Reviews of An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia

Marcia Langton, The Australian, Chronicler of a Disaster Foretold, 4 March 2009
He was a humanist with a great regard for Aboriginal people and their traditions when most Australians despised Aborigines and were ready to send vigilante parties after them. So why the belated interest in his work? Was it that he was being dragooned into serving as some ideological symbol of the golden age of Aboriginal policy, or perhaps even the symbol of a correct approach? Or even as the father of a current school of thought to which attention should be drawn? There are inklings of this in some of the essays in An Appreciation of Difference but their importance is in the consideration given to his distinguished career and the historical and political circumstances in which he worked, often against the grain.

If a few of the modern anthropologists can rightly claim to have inherited Stanner's mantle, then it is in these humanist, scholarly essays by Sutton, Morphy, Beckett, Nancy Williams, Keen, the great prehistorian John Mulvaney and several others that we see the value of the discipline in understanding Australian life and the accommodation with the first Australians. The ‘sightlessness’ of Australians of which Stanner wrote so eloquently has perhaps been cured a little, as they look at themselves looking at us.

Daniel Oakman, The Canberra Times,14 March 2009
An Appreciation of Difference is an intelligent collection of articles which critically examines his life and legacy. The very different scale and scope of each contribution offers a welcome variety, not often found in such volumes. Some delve into the theoretical underpinnings of Stanner’s scholarly work. Other articles, typically written by those who worked with him, take more a personal approach. The selections are wide-ranging enough to avoid the descent into hagiography.

Martin Flanagan, Sydney Morning Herald, 28–29 March 2009
There is an urgent need for Australian stories like Stanner’s to be taken to the broadest audience possible — such stories are the best and truest response to those who hide so nervously behind the argument that white fellas whishing to engage with Aboriginal people and their culture are motivated by guilt and ‘the black armband view’ of Australian history.

Will Owen, Aboriginal Art & Culture, 26 April 2009
The achievement of the authors who have contributed to An Appreciation of Difference is to demonstrate how the principles of continuity and change apply equally to the life and work of this great public intellectual, WEH Stanner, himself.

Olga Clendinnen, The Monthly, No. 44, April 2009
The intellectual sinew running through the whole collection, as it did through Stanner's life as a thinker, is the struggle to distinguish continuity and change in the restless flow of experienced life. Stanner knew that what matters most is not structure but the unstable web of present meanings we call culture; not some imagined stasis but the daily flow of action. Theoretically and politically he was on the side of change and of choice.

An Appreciation of Difference neatly unwinds the dragon throttling the biographical enterprise: the temptation to impose one or another stock narrative on a problematic human life. It offers instead a magnificent array of information, insights, analyses, evaluations: multiple takes on a multiple man. But be warned. If you pick it up, it will eat at least a month of your life.

Aram A Yengoyan, Oceania, Vol. 79, No. 2, July 2009
Beckett and Hinkson provide a critical a critical piece which initiates the totality of Stanner’s life and his legacy. Their essay is followed by seventeen critical pieces dealing with the diverse fields which Stanner encountered throughout his life — both academic and anthropological…Each of these pieces must be read and I can hardly do justice to them in this short review.