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Session U3: Urban centres and social protest

1. John Maynard: Fred Maynard and Marcus Garvey: storming the urban white space

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Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the impact of Australian Aboriginal and African American political revolt in the early decades of the twentieth century in relation to the city and urban space. In the United States the aftermath of the civil war witnessed a mass movement of black people from the rural environment to the city in search of better opportunities. These dreams of a better life were largely unfulfilled. Although not on a similar scale the movement of Aboriginal people to the city in the early decades of the twentieth century allowed them an escape from the clutches of the Protection Board and exposure to contact with international black visitors and political manifestos and ideology. Fred Maynard in Australia and Marcus Garvey in the United States both utilized the press and city space to challenge and inform the wider public of the intolerable levels of racism, prejudice and oppression that confronted their people.

Author bio

Professor John Maynard  is Chair of Wollotuka School of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Newcastle and Deputy Chair of the AIATSIS Council. His traditional roots lie with the Worimi people of Port Stephens, New South Wales.  He has held several important fellowships including the Aboriginal History Stanner Fellowship for 1996 at the Australian National University and the New South Wales Premier’s Indigenous History Fellowship for 2003–04. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Australian Historical Association 2000–02 and has worked with and within many urban, rural and remote Aboriginal communities. He is the author of four books, including Aboriginal Stars of the Turf. He holds a Diploma of Aboriginal Studies from the University of Newcastle, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of South Australia and a PhD from the University of Newcastle.

2. Heather Goodall & Allison Cadzow: Rivers and resilience: Aboriginal people on Sydney's Georges River

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 891KB

Abstract

This talk introduces a forthcoming book which challenges the idea that cities are not Aboriginal places. The research has been carried out in close consultation with Aboriginal people who live or have lived on the Georges River in south western Sydney. This is a densely populated and polluted river which has borne the heaviest impact of Sydney’s post war industrialization. It remains the most ethnically diverse and most economically depressed area of the city and so continues to face high levels of social conflict. Yet it has also had a vibrant Aboriginal history in which the spaces of the river’s uneven geography have enabled surviving traditional owners and incoming rural people to use mobility as well as tenacity to form the complex Aboriginal societies in the area today. This river has a history not just of bare survival but of active political resistance and of creative restoration of cultural responsibility over country, both on the river and its banks.

Author bios:

Dr Allison Cadzow is co-author with Heather Goodall of Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal people and Sydney's Georges River, UNSW Press, 2009. She also co-authored the website Gold and Silver: Vietnamese migration and relationships with environments in Vietnam and Sydney (Migration Heritage Centre website, 2006) with Heather Goodall. Allison prepared material for the Board of Studies website on Aboriginal education in NSW and is co-editing a resource book for teachers of HSC level Aboriginal Studies in NSW schools with Professor John Maynard. Allison received the 2009 Library Council of NSW Honorary Fellowship to research the State Library of NSW collections on traveller, environmentalist and Buddhist Marie Byles.

Professor Heather Goodall teaches History at UTS. She has worked closely in collaborative social history projects with Indigenous people and published on Indigenous people’s cultural and environmental relationships in colonial and contemporary Australia. One of her current projects is on the environmental history of Sydney’s urban Georges River with Indigenous, Anglo, Arabic-speaking and Vietnamese Australians, the first book from which is Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal people on Sydney’s Georges River (co-authored with Dr Allison Cadzow, UNSW Press, 2009) The other is investigating the political, cultural and environmental interactions of Intercoloniality in the Indian Ocean with Devleena Ghosh, Stephen Muecke and Michael Pearson.

3. Jay Arthur & Karolina Kilian: From lttle things big things grow: Representing a story of Indigenous civil rights in the National Museum of Australia

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 1.4MB

Abstract

In this paper Jay Arthur and Karolina Kilian, curators at the National Museum of Australia, explore the issues involved in the curation of the exhibition From little things big things grow: fighting for Indigenous rights 1920-1970.  This was a difficult exhibition to curate. In the beginning, there were almost no objects. There were two audiences – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – with quite different understandings of this time. There was a history of uncomfortable truths to be communicated. Concurrently, there was an obligation to the visitors, many of whom will be school students, not to leave them in despair while being true to the historical record.  These and other issues faced by the curatorial team will be discussed in this presentation.

Author Bios:

Jay Arthur is a curator with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program at the National Museum, where she has curated exhibitions on civil rights and resistance to the British occupation. Formerly she was a curator at the National Archives of Australia and she was also a curator in the National Museum at the time of the opening , where she worked in the Land and People program. Dr Arthur has also been a lexicographer and an artist.

Karolina Kilian is an assistant curator with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program at the National Museum, where she has curated an exhibition on civil rights and helped organize the 2007 Australian and Pacific Museums Workshops.  Formerly, she has worked in the Museum's Registration section, in the Travelling Exhibitions sections of the National Gallery of Australia and in the Pacific Cultures department at the National Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.