Journals
2011 EN
Lynne Hume
This paper will give an account of the history of an Aboriginal community in far nonh Queensland (Yarrabah) using as primary source material, archival material and oral accounts from old people living today who remember what it was like to grow up on a mission. The use of both historical sources and personal narratives lends credence to both as they tend to feed back into one another. Such an approach helps to guard against bias from one person's account and reduces the chances of distortion. The period covered is 1892 to 1960, from the year of the founding of the mission to the year when it became a government reserve. During this time the Aboriginal inhabitants of Yarrabah attempted various strategies of resistance to European domination; most were responses to changing missionary and government policies.
Australian National University
Journals
2011 EN
Christine Choo
This paper is an edited version of the submission which I made to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their families. In particular it addressed Term of Reference (a): 'Trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their families by compulsion, duress or unique influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies'. I drew on the research I had undertaken for a doctoral thesis: 'Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900-1950', University of Western Australia. In addition to this written submission I made a verbal submission at the HREOC hearing in Broome among the descendants of the children who had originally been removed to Beagle Bay Mission. My submission and the contents of my PhD thesis were made available to the Broome Aboriginal community as a contribution to their own preparation the Inquiry. This was a practical way in which the historical research could be used by the Broome community for their own purposes.
Australian National University
Journals
2011 EN
Gaynor Macdonald
I was on Erambie mission in Cowra in the early 1980s, sitting on a chair on the lawn while one of the guys cut my hair. An older Wiradjuri man saw us and came up to tell me to make sure I picked up every bit of hair when we had finished. No explanation, just, ‘You don’t want to leave that lying around now’. He moved on, and as he did, a young woman sitting with others on the grass turned to me with a nod, ‘Yeh, you could get sung, you know!’ She smiled but it was clear she was serious and sharing his concern. While I personally do not know of Wiradjuri people who train these days in the arts of sorcery, it is nevertheless an ever-present fact of life. People remain susceptible to it, one never knows who might be around who does practise it, or where people have visited where they have been in contact with it. But I was surprised by this man’s comment. Not by his obvious reference to the existence of spiritual powers or forces which can be mobilised by people, but because this same man had, earlier that very day, been at pains to convince me my studies of ‘culture’ in Wiradjuri country were misconceived — there was no culture left. In retrospect, with more understanding of aspects of Wiradjuri experience and of that particular person, it seems that he was doing what many non-Aboriginal Australians do: working on a stereotypical notion of what ‘Aboriginal culture’ should look like and, in the process, devaluing the culture that he and others around him were actually living.
Australian National University
Journals
2011 EN
David Trudinger
The author seeks to examine the role of missionaries - in particular that of the Reverend JRB Love - in 'negotiating' the relative place of the colonising language, English, and an Indigenous language, Pitjantjatjara, in the life of an Aboriginal mission station, Ernabella, in Central Australia in the early 1940s. Lest there be any confusion, Love was also a 'translator' in the narrower sense, being involved at the mission in the conversion of part of the biblical text to the Indigenous language. This is an instructive story in itself that this article can only touch on, but I am more interested here in examining his role in, and his rationale for, advocating and attempting to negotiate a bilingual language policy at the mission site against an opposing vernacular-only policy.
Australian National University
Journals
2011 EN
Joanne Scott · Ross Laurie
This article offers a case study of the Brisbane Exhibition from its inception in 1876 through to the 1910s when its Aboriginal courts were among the event's major attractions. One of the largest agricultural shows in Australia and one of the oldest annual events in post-contact Queensland, the Brisbane show has been a central feature of the community's social life and has consistently attracted huge crowds. The choice of time period, which spans the late frontier and the early post-frontier eras, emphasises the importance of identifying absences as well as inclusions in tracing a history of Indigenous participation in and representation at agricultural shows. It facilitates an assessment of the significance of Aboriginal displays and performances to the Queensland government authorities who organised them and the predominantly white audiences who flocked to the exhibits. In the 1910s, Brisbane's annual show was the most important medium through which those authorities sought to convey to the general public a vision of Indigenous people as a compliant group who could be trained to be useful workers, were subject to segregative practices, but were reassuringly inculcated with aspects of the broader community's value system. Accounts of visitors' reactions to the Aboriginal exhibits suggest, however, that they may have been more interested in those items deemed 'exotic' and 'authentically Aboriginal' than those objects which represented the achievements of the reserve and mission system. How the Indigenous creators and participants who provided the content of the displays viewed their role at the Exhibition remains frustratingly elusive.
Australian National University
Journals
2011 EN
Felicity Jensz
Throughout the colonial world, sex, sexuality and intimacy were topics of intense scrutiny. In colonial spaces sexual control was, according to Ann Laura Stoler, a method in which colonial authorities could regulate not only the lives of the Europeans within colonial spaces, but also the lives of Indigenous peoples. Missionaries were also very concerned with the sexuality and sexual practices of the people amongst whom they worked, and often saw the female sexuality of indigenous peoples as being in need of controlling and according to Christian norms. Missionaries had long expected their converts to conform to Christian moral codes relating to sex and sexuality. The historian Gorden Sayre has asserted in the context of seventeenth century northern America that 'missionaries took the well-defined Christian separation between the chaste and the unchaste and used it as an analogy for the distinction between the converted and unconverted around their mission.' Such sentiments seeped into the nineteenth century in all corners of the globe. Chastity was seen as a sign of a docile and regenerate people, and conversely, promiscuous behaviour was a sign of rebellion and a lack of respect for authority and Christian norms. Natasha Erlank has argued that missionaries in the 1840s in Xhosaland, South Africa lacked methods of enforcing upon the converts their preferred sexual codes and therefore used 'the control of spiritual resources to punish converts.' Such control included refusal of baptism, excommunication, and suspension from positions of moral authority. This paper argues that not only exclusion from but also inclusion within Christian practices served as forms of punishment for Indigenous people seen to be at odds with the moral practices and sexual codes expected on a mission station. In particular, this paper contends that the arranged marriages of Indigenous females on Moravian mission stations in the Colony of Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century was undertaken by the missionary in charge in order to control the sexuality of these women.
Australian National University
Journals
2011 EN
Martin Thomas
The American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land is sometimes referred to as the 'last of the big expeditions'. Despite the hype (and there was plenty of that), exploration - at least in the terrestrial sense - was not its purpose. Rather, it was the frontier of knowledge that members of the Expedition hoped to penetrate. This involved co-ordinated study of both the natural environment and its Aboriginal inhabitants. Occurring in the aftermath of World War II, the Arnhem Land Expedition was a watershed event, emblematic of broader transformations in Australia and beyond. In terms of diplomatic objectives, it reflected the desire of Ben Chifley's Labor Government, then in its last days, to shore up the relationship with the United States through an overt display of collaboration between the two nations. Widely reported in the press, and transmitted to the world through film, radio and print media, this 'friendly mission' was a public face to behind-the-scenes negotiations that would shape the trans-Pacific relationship for the remainder of the twentieth century. Domestic support for the Arnhem Land Expedition is indicative of the pro-American sentiments of Australia's major political parties, then adjusting to a post-war climate of decolonisation and the demise of Britain as a global power. It was Chifley's successor, Robert Menzies, who signed the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS) in 1951.
Australian National University
Book Series
2011 EN
Martin Thomas
The story begins at Umbakumba on the east coast of Groote Eylandt, the first base for the 1948 American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. The party arrived there early in April 1948 and stayed three months. The position in the modern atlas of Umbakumba—an Aboriginal camping place for millennia—dates from the 1930s when it became a refuelling base for the Qantas Empire Airways flying boats that travelled the long-haul route between Sydney, Singapore and the south of England. Since World War II, Umbakumba had grown and morphed to the extent that officials in Darwin had come to cautiously recognise it as an Aboriginal settlement, intended in some indeterminate way for the betterment of the local population. Elsewhere in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Christian missionaries had been entrusted as the agents of this ‘civilising’ process. Umbakumba, in contrast, was effectively the initiative of a solitary individual: a self-styled superintendent named Frederick Harold Gray, who is said to have developed the settlement ‘in protest of missionary methods’.1 Gray had no religious agenda or affiliation, and there was no place of worship, at least in the Christian sense. The Expedition botanist, Raymond Specht, has described it as a ‘secular mission’.2
Book Series
2011 EN
Benedicta Rousseau
Assessing the origins of the Bislama term, kastom, anthropologists have highlighted its essentially oppositional nature (Bolton 1999; Lindstrom 1982; Rousseau 2004). Emerging in the context of colonisation and missionisation, kastom provided a discursive marker of a lifestyle apart from that of skul—the way of the mission (Bolton 1999). Over the next century, it found itself enmeshed in a variety of ‘evaluative dualisms’ (Lindstrom 1982), as practices, material culture and demeanour became linked with the descriptor, kastom. Vanuatu’s experience of modernity could be characterised as a series of ‘otherings’, with the category of kastom positioned in oppositional relationships that provide a definition of indigeneity (Taylor 2010). In some ways, though, kastom works to resist or obscure this action, carrying with it ideological connotations of stability, primordialism, constancy. This chapter seeks to expose the fluidity of kastom, charting the fluctuating relationship between the spheres of kastom and politics over the past 30 years, and the multiple ‘others’ created through that interaction.1
Journals
2011 EN
Jorge Sánchez-Sesma · Arthur J. Miller
PAGES news • Vol 19 • No 2 • July 2011 far EAQUA has achieved its mission of enhancing growth of the Quaternary science community in the region through training, collaborative research and information exchange. Participants were urged to come up with tangible results, such as student exchange programs and joint proposals. He challenged the Institute of Marine Sciences of the University of Dar es Salaam to develop a postgraduate program in maritime archeology, which could boost archeological studies in the entire Great Lakes Region. The EAQUA workshop was preceded by a one day INQUA/EAQUA meeting with presentations from INQUA, Pan African START Secretariat (PASS) and EAQUA country representatives. INQUA presented objectives, activities and available opportunities for the EAQUA members to participate in the programs of the commissions. PASS presented opportunities to the members for training and research, for example, the African Climate Change Fellowship Program (ACCFP) and the Education Program on Climate Change and Biodiversity Conservation. Participants were urged to take a leading role in utilizing these opportunities. Country representatives reported on Quaternary research activities in the region and felt that more capacity building is required. The general theme of the 3rd EAQUA workshop was “Onand off-shore: Eastern Africa during the last 100 ka”. The workshop had 40 oral and 5 poster presentations. Talks were divided into six sessions namely (i) Marine and lacustrine records and reconstruction, (ii) Techniques and methodological development in Quaternary research, (iii) Paleoclimate reconstruction, (iv) Vegetation reconstruction (v) Recent trends in climate change-Impacts and vulnerability assessment for eastern Africa, and (vi) Trade, anthropology and archeological studies in Eastern Africa. Time was also allocated for a roundtable discussion where several priority areas of research were identified: (i) Compilation of modern archives of climatic records for the last millennia, (ii) Reconnaissance program to establish caves hosting speleothems, (iii) Creation of a database of Quaternary scientists and projects working in eastern Africa; (iv) Archeology, environment and Humans focusing on issues such as hydrology, vegetation, fire, human-climatic influences, and others. Additionally, the need for several focused meetings with a progressive agenda was emphasized. The EAQUA workshop concluded with a discussion of association matters, including the election of executive members. Elected for a period of 2 years are: Prof. Mohammed Umer (President), Prof. Alfred N.N. Muzuka (Vice President), Ms Christine Ogolla (Secretary General), Ms Jackline Nyiracyiza (Treasurer), Prof. Asfawossen Asrat (News Letter Editor), Dr. Immaculate Ssemmanda (National Representative (NR Uganda), Ms. Rahab Kinyanjui (NR Kenya), Elgidius Ichumbaki (NR Tanzania), Dr. Julius Lejju (Ex-Officio), Dr. Margareth Avery (INQUA).
Past Global Changes (PAGES)