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Australian Early Settlement...
by Maireid Sullivan
2014, updated 2023
Work in progress

"Those who lose dreaming are lost" – Australian Aboriginal proverb
Introduction
– Genetic Research
– South Pacific Trade
– Sojourners
– Rewriting the history of Aboriginal land management

Part 1
– The Age of Discovery: Explorers, Traders, Settlers
– The First Europeans in the Antipodes

Part 2
– Pristine New World
– Discoveries Continue
– Key Historical References
– MESSAGE STICKS

Part 3
– Transportation - convicts & free settlers
– Invasion Day aka Australia Day

Part 4
– White Australia Policy

Part 5
- The Dreamtime
– "Walkabout" to Cultural Discovery
– Indigenous Rites of Passage into Manhood
– In Recovery: The Stolen Generation

Part 6
Legendary Australians
- Lowitja O'Donoghue
- Gary Foley
- Kath Walker/Oodgeroo Noonuccal
- Kev Carmody
- Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter
- Pat Dodson
- Marcia Langton

"To us, health is about so much more than
simply not being sick. It’s about getting
a balance between physical, mental, emotional,
cultural and spiritual health. Health and healing
are interwoven, which means that one
can’t be separated from the other."
- Dr Tamara Mackean
, a Waljen woman
of Western Australia

Traditions and Beliefs about Water
by Maireid Sullivan, 2006
Every culture on earth relates a legend
of a deluge or great flood, along with
beliefs that life came from water. . .
In Australian Aboriginal myth,
the Wandjina Rain Spirit
of the Wunambul, Wororra
and Ngarinyin language people
is the controller of the 'Seasons' –
the bringer of rain – the waters of life.
She is the Woongurr –
the powerful and wise leader
who commands respect
for the great powers of water.
>>> more

“We don’t accept this idea
of British sovereignty
because it’s unjust.
Now we’re proposing

a better way to do things
and we’ll tell you through song.
We’ll tell you through dance.
We’ll tell you through oratory.
We’ll take you to court.
Then we’ll tell you again
through song, and dance, and oratory.
It’s really a modern epic of Australian history.”

Professor Marcia Langton,
ABC Radio, 2 November, 2012

Wandjina

Year of the World's Indigenous People
Redfern Speech - 10 December 1992

by the Hon. Paul Keating, Prime Minister of Australia, 1991–1996. The Australian launch of The International Year of the World's Indigenous People, 1993

" …It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia. How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia. Redfern is a good place to contemplate these things. Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers landed, in too many ways it tells us that their failure to bring much more than devastation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia continues to be our failure..." - Read the full speech

Pre-colonialism
Human Phenotypes
Interactive resources illustrating different anthropological types of the pre-colonial world.
#1. Browse phenotypes in the world map...
Maps and most descriptions refer to the distribution around the year 1500 before the processes of colonisation and globalisation...

Introduction
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"A hunter-gatherer lifestyle was dominant until the arrival of Europeans, although there is evidence of land management by practices such as cultural burning, and in some areas,
agriculture, fish farming, and permanent settlements."

- Prehistory of Australia

Genetic Research
Researchers have traced Australian settlement back more than 50,000 years. A study, published in Nature, March 2017, was jointly supervised by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, and the Environment Institute at The University of Adelaide:
"when people stopped moving they stayed put, putting down cultural roots that have weathered 50,000 years of significant cultural and climatic change."
– Tobler, R., Rohrlach, A., Soubrier, J. et al., (2017),
Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia, Vol 544, p. 180–184:

Abstract
Aboriginal Australians represent one of the longest continuous cultural complexes known. Archaeological evidence indicates that Australia and New Guinea were initially settled approximately 50 thousand years ago (ka); however, little is known about the processes underlying the enormous linguistic and phenotypic diversity within Australia. Here we report 111 mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) from historical Aboriginal Australian hair samples, whose origins enable us to reconstruct Australian phylogeographic history before European settlement. Marked geographic patterns and deep splits across the major mitochondrial haplogroups imply that the settlement of Australia comprised a single, rapid migration along the east and west coasts that reached southern Australia by 49–45 ka.
After continent-wide colonization, strong regional patterns developed and these have survived despite substantial climatic and cultural change during the late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. Remarkably, we find evidence for the continuous presence of populations in discrete geographic areas dating back to around 50 ka, in agreement with the notable Aboriginal Australian cultural attachment to their country.

South Pacific Trade
Early trade between the South Pacific peoples, crossing over from the islands to the regions across northern Australia, is well documented.

According to an April 2018 report from Kasih Norman, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wollongong, "Island-hopping study shows the most likely route the first people took to Australia"

Excerpt: The First Australians were among the world’s earliest great ocean explorers, undertaking a remarkable 2,000km maritime migration through Indonesia which led to the discovery of Australia at least 65,000 years ago.
But the voyaging routes taken through Indonesia’s islands, and the location of first landfall in Australia, remain a much debated mystery to archaeologists. Our research, published earlier this year in Quaternary Science Reviews, highlights the most likely route by mapping islands in the region over time through changing sea levels. >>> more

Makassan contact with Australia
Introductory notes and links.

Excerpt: Makassan Trepangers from the southwest corner of Sulawesi, Indonesia began visiting the coast of northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 1700s, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land to collect and process trepang (aka sea cucumber), a marine invertebrate sea cucumber prized for its culinary value generally and for its medicinal properties in Chinese markets.
The term Makassan (or Macassan) is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia, although some were from other islands in the Indonesian Archipelago, including TimorRote and Aru.>>> more

Bradshaw Rock Art
First discovered in 1891, the "Bradshaw Rock Art" reveal an exotic history of ancient South Pacific Island cultural exchange.

2023 study:
Prehistoric human migration between Sundaland and South Asia was driven by sea-level rise.
04 February 2023, Nature

Abstract
Rapid sea-level rise between the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the mid-Holocene transformed the Southeast Asian coastal landscape, but the impact on human demography remains unclear. Here, we create a paleogeographic map, focusing on sea-level changes during the period spanning the LGM to the present-day and infer the human population history in Southeast and South Asia using 763 high-coverage whole-genome sequencing datasets from 59 ethnic groups. We show that sea-level rise, in particular meltwater pulses 1 A (MWP1A, ~14,500–14,000 years ago) and 1B (MWP1B, ~11,500–11,000 years ago), reduced land area by over 50% since the LGM, resulting in segregation of local human populations. Following periods of rapid sea-level rises, population pressure drove the migration of Malaysian Negritos into South Asia. Integrated paleogeographic and population genomic analysis demonstrates the earliest documented instance of forced human migration driven by sea-level rise.
Introduction
The transition from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ~26,000–21,000 years ago) to the mid-Holocene (~6000 years ago) was the last major period of global warming in Earth’s history. ...
>>>more

"SOJOURNERS: Flowers and the Wide Sea; The Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia" (1992), University of Queensland Press, by Eric C. Rolls (1923-2007) - the first of a two part series tracing the first wave of Chinese migrants to Australia.
"For generations the Chinese regarded themselves as the flowers of the Flowery Land while those across the wide sea were the barbarians."
"Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea;
Continuing Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia" (1996), the sequel to Sojourners, "includes discussion of very early Chinese contact with northern Australia; trade in trepang (beche-de-mer) between the Aboriginal people of east Arnhem Land, the Macassans and Chinese traders."

"Australia and China lay side by side for 300 million years. They drifted apart for millions more, and now, so geologists believe, they are moving back towards one another at the rate of a few centimetres a year. Within imaginable time, some anthropologists believe, the slight, thin-boned Peking man sailed down to Australia in well-built rafts, mixed with a sturdy Indonesian people who were already here and engendered the Aborigine."
Eric C. Rolls (1923-2007), Sojourners, 1992, p. 2.

2017: Chinese translation of Sojourners: the epic story of China's centuries-old relationship with Australia, translated by Prof Zhang Wei, Director of Australian Studies Centre of Shantou University, published by Sun Yat-sen University Press, is launched in Guangzhou this summer. ... After 25 years, it has finally arrived in China to meet the Chinese readers.  
It is the second part of a series which began with Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea, also translated by Professor Zhang. ... - Australian Consulate-General, Guangzhou, China.

In 1992, Eric C. Rolls was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to literature and environmental awareness and, in 2001, he received a Centenary Medal. - National Library Catalogue

Eric C. Rolls AM died in New South Wales in 2007.
Excerpt from his ANU Obituary

Eric Charles Rolls, who has died at 84, was born into a western NSW farming family and educated at home by correspondence. His promise as a storyteller emerged early. Every Friday afternoon his kindergarten teacher in Grenfell, Miss Postlethwaite, told stories to the class. Finding her rather dull, Eric put up his hand one day and said: "Miss Postlethwaite, I'd like to tell a story." He told about a grain of wheat, from sowing to harvesting, miming the process as he talked. When he started telling stories every Friday, adults came to listen. . .

“Much of the game of writing history, is keeping it true.” - Eric Rolls

Golden disobedience: the history of Eric Rolls

by ANU Professor of History Tom Griffiths,
6 August 2016, Inside Story
For Eric Rolls, historical writing needed to serve the future.

Excerpt: It is the detail that matters, and it is getting it right that matters, too. “Much of the game of writing history,” he declares at the start of the book, “is keeping it true.” And keeping it true, for Eric, means not just finding out what happened, but also finding a sense of wonder about it, and understanding it in such detail and with such precision that he can make the story live. Use of the active tense – and his books bristle with it – requires quite specific knowledge. The passive tense, by contrast, allows slippage and can mask ignorance. Rolls’s prose is bracing and vivid. “At times,” he says, “I can even smell what I’m writing about.” His books won many awards, but he was particularly proud to win the Braille Book of the Year and the Talking Book of the Year, for he often said, “I write to make people see.” There is also a “swagger” to his style – and he consciously cultivates it – because it enables him to tell a story with conviction. This careful accretion of authentic organic detail generates the power of his non-fiction. But Eric would have refused that division of fiction and non-fiction. As he put it, “There’s imaginative writing and pedestrian writing, that’s all.”
. . .
By the mid to late 1990s, the frontline of conservation battles had moved from the logging of old-growth forests on public land to the clearing of native vegetation for farming on private or leasehold land. In this new context, Rolls’s argument about the history of tree density was misinterpreted for political purposes by both farmers and scientists.
There was also continuing scientific and cultural resistance to recognising the significance and sophistication of Aboriginal burning.

As Judith Wright wrote in her 1982 review of A Million Wild Acres:

It is as strange to me as to Rolls that some scientists and others still dispute the effect of Aboriginal fire-management, or even that there was such management. Again and again in my own reading of stock-inspectors’ reports in the Queensland of the sixties and seventies, there is reference to the change in pasture growth and shrub cover which followed the vanishing of the Aborigines and the fierce protectiveness of squatters for their timber fences, huts, yards and vulnerable slow-moving flocks of sheep. But no doubt such evidence is too much that of laymen to be trusted by academic ecologists.

The politics of this issue are so embedded and have such a long history that they are often unconscious. Scientific disdain for Aboriginal ecological knowledge was once racist; now it is sometimes simply anti-humanist. In other words, the same scientific suspicions can apply to settler knowledge – indeed to local knowledge of any kind – because it is human, anecdotal and apparently informal. . . >>>more


Rewriting the history of Aboriginal land management
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2011
"One of the greatest books ever written" - Professor Marcia Langton
Bill Gammage (2011) The Biggest Estate on Earth:
How Aborigines Made Australia
, Allen & Unwin


Pre-Colonialism Australia: Natural Wilderness or Gentleman's park?
Professor Marcia Langton tells why the book that rewrites the history of Aboriginal land management before white colonisation makes it to her list of the 10 greatest books ever written
By Gabrielle Murphy, 25 Sept. 2015, Humanities, Melbourne University

Excerpt:
On publication in 2011, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia won universal praise in political and literary circles, including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

But it hardly caused a ripple – from then till now – in dislodging common assumptions long held by many Australians, first learned in the classroom and often trotted out since.

Revealing pre-colonial Australia as a landscape of grassy patches, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, Gammage’s groundbreaking book details how Aboriginal people followed an extraordinarily complex system of land management. This system used fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year, all based, says Marcia Langton, on an encyclopaedic knowledge of their environments, seasonal weather patterns and biota.

Bill Gammage (2011) The Biggest Estate on Earth:
How Aborigines Made Australia
, Allen & Unwin
Bill Gammage AM FASSA is an Australian historian, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU). ...
Summary
Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.

Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised.

For over a decade, Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it.

With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires we now experience. And what we think of as virgin bush in a national park is nothing of the kind.
>>>more

Part 1
The Age of Discovery: Explorers, Traders, Settlers
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The Age of Discovery
A prelude to the Age of Discovery was a series of European land expeditions across Eurasia in the late Middle Ages. These expeditions were undertaken by a number of explorers, including Marco Polo (1254-1324, Venice Italy), who left behind a detailed and inspiring record of his travels across Asia. >>> more

1421, the Year China Discovered The World
by Gavin Menzies, 2002
Gavin Menzies was a member of the British Royal Navy, and had the advantage of being able to read naval charts. Menzies claims the founder of the Qin dynasty and the first emperor of a unified China, Ying Zheng's vice-admirals, Hong Bao and Zhou Man 'discovered' Australia almost 350 years before Captain James Cook's first landing. The GAVIN MENZIES website provides a wealth of insights, references: “. . . created by Gavin Menzies and his research team. The site serves as a focal point for ongoing research into pre-Columbian voyages to the New World. The research team was set up to receive and disseminate all information received via this website”

Abstract
“…On the 8th of March, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was ‘to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas’ and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. The journey would last over two years and circle the globe.
When they returned Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans…”
>>> more

The Mahogany Ship controversy
An 'ancient' shipwreck - “a three hundred ton vessel” - discovered buried under sand west of Warrnambool in southwest Victoria, Australia, was, according to Gavin Menzies (2002), a modified Chinese junk: "it was made of a 'dark wood' and was 'of an unconventional design'. He also cited claims that local Aborigines had a tradition that "yellow men" had at one time come from the wreck." The controversy continues . . . >>>more

By the mid-1500s, China had withdrawn from world trade in order to focus on internal border protection. In 1557, Portugal was given permission to ‘rent’ land on Macau in return for help in safeguarding China's coastline against piracy.
See Columbia University's Asia for Educators


The First Europeans in the Antipodes
In 1595, the Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros (1563?-1615) was appointed chief pilot of an expedition of four ships leading Spanish voyages of discovery in the Pacific Ocean. The first records of European mariners sailing into 'Australian' waters occurs around 1606, and includes their observations of the land.

Prior to Captain Cook’s voyage, both Antarctica and Australia were regarded as one combined land mass known as Terra Australis Incognita, Latin for “unknown southern continent”.

Terra Nullius (Latin: “land belonging to no one” )
The English applied this principle to claim possession of the Australian continent after Captain James Cook, accompanied by Botanist Joseph Banks, undertook the first British south Pacific expedition from 1768 to 1771: Because they saw few 'natives' along the coast, they assumed that there would be fewer or none inland.

Terra Nullius came to mean territories inhabited but "devoid of civilized society."

Terra nullius: Council of Aboriginal Reconciliation
Excerpt: British colonisation policies and subsequent land laws were framed in the belief that the colony was being acquired by occupation (or settlement) of a terra nullius (land without owners). The colonisers acknowledged the presence of Indigenous people but justified their land acquisition policies by saying the Aborigines were too primitive to be actual owners and sovereigns and that they had no readily identifiable hierarchy or political order which the British Government could recognise or negotiate with.
The High Court's Mabo judgment in 1992 overturned the terra nullius fiction. In the same judgment, however, the High Court accepted the British assertion of sovereignty in 1788, and held that from that time there was only one sovereign power and one system of law in Australia.

Freycinet MapThe Freycinet Map of 1811 was the product of centuries of the charting of Australia’s coasts by Dutch, English and French navigators.
"Nicolas Thomas Baudin (1754-1803) and Louis-Claude Desaulses De Freycinet (1779-1842) worked together as cartographic surveyors and naturalists."Australian Dictionary of Biography

and on TROVE: National Library of Australia

While precedence of discovery of Australia has been claimed for Portugal and Spain, Netherlands, China, France, and more, records show that 54 European ships from a range of nations made contact between 1606 and 1770.

The Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, (1570-1630), aboard the Duyfken, was the first to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people. Following Willem Janszoon’s maps of the north, west and south coasts, Captain James Cook explored the east cost in 1770, and charted the east coast of Australia, which he named "New South Wales".
~ National Library of Australia: Who was the first European to land on Australia?
~ Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415-1800, page 87

~ YouTube: replica of Dutch VOC vessel Duyfken - the first European ship to reach Australia in 1606

From from 1768 to 1771, Captain James Cook undertook the first British voyage - an astronomical and botanical expedition – to explore the south Pacific, on the HMS Endeavour, accompanied by three scientists: Joseph Banks (1743-1820, England), Herman Spöring (1733-1771, Sweden), and Daniel Solander (1733-1782, Sweden). 

View an interactive retelling of the history:
Explorer, navigator, coloniser:
revisit Captain Cook’s legacy with the click of a mouse
April 29, 2020
The Conversation "threads together dozens of perspectives to trace Cook’s journey through the Pacific and his interactions with Indigenous peoples. It also explores how – 18 years after the Endeavour left – Australia came to be the site of a new British penal colony."

In addition:
Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, and other myths from old school text books

Louise Zamati, University of Tasmania
April 29, 2020
“To find out how the teaching of Captain Cook in Australian schools has changed, I examined textbooks used in the 1950s until today.”
>>>more

Part 2
A pristine new world
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There were approximately eight hundred languages spoken by a population estimated at 700,000 indigenous people across many tribal communities throughout the Australian continent. Under British settlement, Aboriginal people were removed from their traditional lands, massacred, enslaved, and segregated, while Aboriginal people are renowned for their compassion in rescuing and 'taking in' ex-convicts who could never return to their homelands. Once their prison sentence was served, they were fortunate to be able to enjoy freedom in a pristine new world.

Indigenous Languages Today: AIATSIS

  • More than 250 Indigenous Australian languages including 800 dialectal varieties were spoken on the continent at the time of European settlement in 1788
    .
  • Today, approximately only 13 Indigenous Australian languages have a sufficient number of young people speaking them to sustain the language into the future.

  • Approximately another 100 or so are spoken to various degrees by older generations, with many of these languages at risk as Elders pass away. >>> more
Discoveries continue
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Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago
Clarkson, C., Jacobs, Z., Marwick, B. et al. Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. 
Nature 547, 306–310 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22968
Nature, 20 July 2017

Abstract
The time of arrival of people in Australia is an unresolved question. It is relevant to debates about when modern humans first dispersed out of Africa and when their descendants incorporated genetic material from Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other hominins. Humans have also been implicated in the extinction of Australia’s megafauna. Here we report the results of new excavations conducted at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in northern Australia. Artefacts in primary depositional context are concentrated in three dense bands, with the stratigraphic integrity of the deposit demonstrated by artefact refits and by optical dating and other analyses of the sediments. Human occupation began around 65,000 years ago, with a distinctive stone tool assemblage including grinding stones, ground ochres, reflective additives and ground-edge hatchet heads. This evidence sets a new minimum age for the arrival of humans in Australia, the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, and the subsequent interactions of modern humans with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

ABC-RN Awaye!
Following the above July 2017 report, published in Nature
:
Excavating deep time
Presented by Daniel Browning
13 January 2018 6:07PM
Listen or download audio:
You may not know the name of Madjedbebe, but you will.
It's a rock shelter that sits atop one of the world's largest uranium deposits - the Jabiluka mining lease wholly surrounded by Kakadu National Park. ... The analysis dates the first occupation of the site at 65,000 years - making Madjedbebe the oldest site of human occupation on the Australian continent.
Guests
- Justin O'Brien, Chief executive officer, Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation
- Bruce Pascoe, writer, editor and publisher
- Professor Zenobia Jacobs, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Wollongong, specialising in geochronology
- Associate Professor Chris Clarkson, archaeologist from the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland, led the most recent excavations at Majdedbebe
Excerpt:

(14:15)
Daniel Browning: For the Mirarr, and no doubt Aboriginal people all over the country, 65 thousand years is a long time. But it's the scientific community, the archaeologist that get caught up in the dates. Here’s Justin O’Brien from Gundjeihmi.
[Chief executive of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation]
14:40)
Justin O’Brien: … Aboriginal people here will say the sense of deep time is lost to all people I think. In practical terms. If we say to Mirarr traditional owners, we’re talking about a difference of, you know, 47 to 65 thousand years, it’s almost like a ‘so-so?’. Now you can discount that as being - oh, people don’t understand deep time. First of all, who does? And whether its 35k or 47 or 65 thousand years - that IS ‘time immemorial’. That’s time beyond the reckoning of memory - cultural memory - it’s except these guys here.
(15:21)
Bruce Pascoe: Since I was at school, its gone from 5 thousand years to 80 thousand years - probably 125 thousand years or greater - of occupation, which takes us beyond “out of Africa” so when’s the siren going to go off and people will say ‘Oh! they have always been here.’ Exactly what those old people were saying and I often think about those old people and the pain they must have felt at being doubted. And being insulted. And being treated as children. And in there mind - in there heart - they knew exactly what they were talking about. And they were talking to heathens. And that must have hurt them.”
(16:04)
Daniel Browning: The writer and historian Bruce Pascoe who has spent a lot of time finding historical evidence for Aboriginal agriculture. Evidence of complex systems of land management existed here for thousands and thousands of years.
(16:18)
Bruce Pascoe: That’s why I’m happy today because I think we can start this conversation. And it’s not ‘good fella black fella’ conversation. It’s about humanity. And how we manage humanity. Our shared humanity. So, I’m excited. I’ve already had a dozen fantastic conversations today. And I’m very hopeful. Hopeful that we can continue this conversation because it’s a conversation of real intelligence. A searching. And a craving for more information. If we start doing it together, then I’m hoping our people will benefit from it. And not be dispossessed again. Intellectually, this time. This is a fabulous continent. The continent wants to talk to us. Has been trying to talk to us. And ‘white’ Australia’s been deaf to it and, now, today, when we see this news coming out, maybe we can start to listen. Maybe this is one of the ways we turn the corner in our appreciation of where we live.
–Note: In Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture Or Accident? (2014), Bruce Pascoe documents accounts of grain cultivation, flour, wells, and dams, controversially contradicting pre-colonial claims that Australian Aboriginal peoples were hunter-gatherers.


MESSAGE STICKS:
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Rich ways of weaving Aboriginal cultures into the Australian Curriculum
by Nerinda Sandry, Strategic Learning
In terms of classroom learning and the Australian Curriculum, the exploration of message sticks brings together history, science, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, literacy and art. . .

Australia is a vast land. Not surprising then that it is home to a large number of different indigenous cultural groups. Over tens of thousands of years, “a rich diversity of tribal groups, each speaking their own languages and having a variety of cultural beliefs and traditions” has emerged (Hill, C. 2004). It is estimated that around 250 distinct indigenous languages were spoken in 1788 with around 600 dialectal variations. Message sticks have played an important part in communication between Aboriginal groups across the immense Australian landscape. In our classrooms, message sticks offer a way of understanding the diversity of indigenous cultures in a way that most students can relate to. Whilst the diverse oral culture of Aboriginal people is well-known, message sticks may not be something teachers are familiar with, hence this background briefing blog.

Message sticks are a form of communication between Aboriginal nations, clans and language groups even within clans. ...
Message sticks helped support the oral message that the carrier would provide, especially when languages of groups were very different. But there were enough marks to ensure that the original message would not be misinterpreted. More importantly, the message stick itself was a ‘passport’ which gave the carrier protection. When someone carrying a message stick entered another group’s country, they announced themselves with smoke signals and were then accompanied safely with the message stick to the elders so that they may speak their verbal message. Group members would then accompany the carrier safely back to where they came from with a reply. The message stick also helped to secure safe passage across long distances and through many groups. This was because each time the messenger was directed to meet the elders to show the stick and request permission to pass through and deliver the message to its final destination.
>>>more

Key Historical References
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– AUSTLANG: Aboriginal Languages Database
Bradshaw Rock Art collection
– ANU Biography: Norman Barnett Tindale, AO (1900-1993)
Norman B. Tindale was an anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist, a WW2 code breaker, and an expert on the Pleistocene geology of Australia. Tindale began his work with the South Australian Museum in 1921. He recorded vast amounts of genealogical information about Indigenous communities from all over Australia. Over 50,000 Indigenous people are included in the genealogies, as well as thousands of named photographic portraits. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Aboriginal tribal groups and consistently refuted the notion that Aboriginal people, being nomadic, had no enduring relationship with the land. Tindale was among the first to challenge the orthodoxy that Aboriginal presence in Australia was relatively recent. His 1929 excavation with Herbert Hale of a rock shelter at Devon Downs on the Murray River demonstrated prolonged Aboriginal presence and their changing strategies for subsistence in response to environmental change.

In 1974, Tindale’s indigenous map of Australia was published and 50 years of work recognised. At the same time, a new method of dating called carbon dating proved beyond all doubt what he had argued for decades; that the Aborigines had inhabited the Australian continent for tens of thousands of years.

Norman Tindale’s indigenous map of Australia - Download large format mapTindale map

ANU Obituary - Norman B. Tindal
Excerpt: At the age of sixty-six, and after a professional career of forty-nine years spent in the service of the South Australian Museum, Norman Barnett Tindale received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1967. . . that such an award was being contemplated by an American university did not reflect well upon the lack of initiative of Australian institutions in this respect. Tindale was eventually honoured with a doctorate by the Australian National University in 1980. But none of those letter writers, assessing the contribution of an anthropologist and scientist in the twilight of his career, could have predicted that Tindale would continue to publish and undertake research for another quarter of a century.
Tindale was an early starter as well as a late finisher.
. . .
At this stage no Aboriginal objects from the island were preserved in any museum. Tindale's Director, Edgar Waite, recognised the ethnographic potential of the expedition and directed the young entomologist to visit the doyen of Australian anthropologists, Baldwin Spencer, at Melbourne's National Museum, for advice. Spencer's advice was simple; to follow the directions for field observation laid out in 'Notes and Queries in Anthropology' (he gave Tindale his own copy) and to keep a field journal with a daily record under every circumstance, even if the following day's events invalidated a previous entry. Spencer also introduced Tindale to the Geographic I method of language transcription, the basis for Tindale's unique collection of more than 150 parallel vocabularies across Aboriginal Australia.
. . .
During 1942 Tindale joined the R.A.A.F. and was assigned the rank of Wing Commander in England before being transferred to the Pentagon to advise on strategic bombing. There he headed the military intelligence unit charged with deciphering Japan's military codes. . .

Closing paragraph:
Professor W. V. MacFarlane
, in praise of Norman Tindale:

It is not common in our time to find men with the skills and insights which Mr Tindale has shown through his active and productive life. He is basically a scientist, while skills with language and human relations fit him for anthropology. His special interests in entomology, geology and botany broadened the scope of his ethnographic studies. As the use of film, tape, carbondating and blood grouping came into anthropological work he readily made use of these for the data that they could bring towards his final synthesis of the cultural history of the Aboriginals in time and space. In addition, Mr Tindale has shown throughout his work a tolerance, humility, honesty and adaptability which made it easy for him to find collaborators amongst both black and white men. (MacFarlane 1966) 

Indigenous Australian Languages Fact Sheet (pdf)
"Language is our soul." - Aunty Rose Fernando, Gamilaroi Elder, 1998)

Excerpt: There are many Indigenous cultures in Australia, made up of people from a rich diversity of tribal groups which each speak their own languages and have a variety of cultural beliefs and traditions. Many Australians are unaware of this cultural and linguistic diversity, and often believe that there is simply one Aboriginal culture and language. It is very difficult to know how many language and traditional social groups existed before European contact, especially in areas affected early on by the forces of colonisation. Many linguists estimate around 250 distinct Indigenous languages were spoken in 1788 (Henderson and Nash 1997; Angelo et al 1998, Walsh 1993); however, it is important to note that views regarding the number of pre-contact languages vary widely. Many of these languages have a number of dialectal variations. A dialect is not a separate language but it can be very different to other dialects of the same language; for example, Scottish and Jamaican English are vastly different (Walsh 1993). A good starting place to develop an understanding of the rich diversity of Australian Indigenous culture and language is by examining Norman Tindale’s (1974a) map of Aboriginal tribal and language territories at the time of European contact. The South Australian Museum holds the original map in their collections, and their website (http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/) explains that in the earlier 20th Century when Tindale begun work on this map it was commonly held that Indigenous people roamed across the land with no fixed territories. Tindale’s map refuted this widely held view by providing graphic evidence that no part of Australia was empty land. This map is printed on four sheets labelled Southwest, Northwest, Northeast and Southeast, with map title printed on the Southwest sheet. ‘Tribal’ names and boundaries are printed in dark blue. States, placenames, major cities and geographical features are printed in brown or blue. Other information includes boundaries of subincision and circumcision rites. Tindale’s Map of Tribal Boundaries (http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/tindale/boundaries_intro.htm):
. . .
Dual naming:
There has been a move in recent years to recognise the validity of Indigenous names and to promote the investigation and official use of these names. In NSW the Geographical Names Board
(http://www.gnb.nsw.gov.au) has established a dual naming sub-committee and dual naming guidelines. These guidelines recognise the significance of Aboriginal culture by giving dual names to already named geographical features, such as, rivers, creeks and mountains. An example of dual naming is Dawes Point Reserve situated under the southern end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority proposed a dual name be considered for the Reserve. Local Indigenous communities and historical sources were consulted to ensure cultural accuracy; a dual name can be assigned only where there is strong evidence of a pre-existing Indigenous placename, and the proposal must have the support of the local community. The Sydney Harbour pilot project has resulted in the Cadigal name Tar-ra, as well as Dawes Point, being adopted and displayed prominently at the Reserve. P. 9 >>>more

Many examples of Aboriginal land management traditions are counter to the narrative of "primitive" peoples.


How the Wiradjuri people of Central West NSW survived first contact with European settlers
ABC Central West, 17 Aug 2018
By Micaela Hambrett
Excerpts:

Much is known about European settlement in the Central West of New South Wales once the mountains were traversed in 1813.
But perhaps not as widely understood are the coexisting arrangements of the first people of the region, in the face of sudden colonial occupation.

First contact
Europeans followed an Aboriginal highway over the Blue Mountains using a track that is now the Great Western Highway.

The initial relations between the new settlers and Wiradjuri were widely reported to be peaceful, with the Wiradjuri sharing their food and resources with the new arrivals.

However a misunderstanding over a potato harvest tipped the squatters and Wiradjuri into all-out war.

Dennis Foley, professor of Indigenous entrepreneurship at the University of Canberra, said the modern-day Bathurst Showground was a rich yam pasture where alluvial soil flooded regularly.
"The yams weren't just growing there wild, they were re-dug and harvested. That whole area was beautiful yam. It was shared with the first explorers, then the first settler came in," Professor Foley said.
"He saw, 'well yams grow, potatoes will grow'. So they grew their potatoes and along come the local clan and they thought, 'well we shared the yams with you, let's borrow a few potatoes'.
"People were killed, and it was all over this misunderstanding of sharing."
Native title historian Michael Bennett completed an Aboriginal heritage study for the Cabonne and Blayney Council local government areas to build a picture of Wiradjuri after European contact.
"As pastoralism spread throughout the west there were fewer and fewer places for Aboriginal people to live," Dr Bennett said.

Intermarriage and kinship
Intermarriage occurred during this period as pastoralists, convicts and settlers took Aboriginal wives and raised Aboriginal children, which furthered the complex nature of frontier relationships.
"They [Irish convicts] were being treated by the British as badly as we [the Wiradjuri] were, so there was a commonality there," Professor Foley said.
"You can see those links; the Irish boys obviously picked up and married the Aboriginal women and that's how you've got so many crossed marriages in a lot of our families."
The concept of kinship is important to Wiradjuri society and explains migration and marriage movement.
"Strong kinship networks were maintained despite intermarriage with non-Indigenous individuals," Dr Bennett said.
"The descendants of mixed unions continued to marry into established Aboriginal families."

Homesteads built on campsites
White settlers were unfamiliar with the land and relied on Aboriginal knowledge to establish their properties, meaning homesteads were built on Wiradjuri campsites — places that were sheltered, had clear water, and were safe from flooding.
...
But Professor Foley believes that history has a way of being the great leveller.
"All the Aboriginal history has been eradicated, the scar trees have gone."
"But several waves of white or non-Indigenous history has also been eradicated and that's what's really interesting.

"But the land remains, the trees are coming back."
"A lot of scrub is coming back — prickly pear and god knows what else — but the beauty of the land remains."
"And it's such a beautiful country."
>>>more

Indigenous suicide shows our traumatic past is just too heavy a burden
by Shannan Dodson for IndigenousX
" Our families have been stripped of the coping mechanisms all people need - and it’s killing us"
Screen capture: The Guardian, 26 March 2019


Part 3
Transportation - convicts & free settlers
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The signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776 forced Britain to find a new penal colony: "Transportation" to Australia from the British Isles and Ireland began after England lost landing rights and control over plantations in North America. The majority of those people transported as convicts were disinherited, impoverished people of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, by whose “hard labour” colonial infrastructure was laid down in preparation for the arrival of “free settlers”.

Invasion Day aka Australia Day
Australia (New Holland) became a British Penal Colony following the arrival, on 24 January 1788, of the First Fleet of 11 ships from England, transporting 1480 men, women and children, including Irish, Scottish, English, French, African, and American convicts.

January 26th is a national holiday across Australia commemorating the day Governor Arthur Phillip raised the British flag at Sydney Cove.

Two days late!
The French arrived on 26 January 1788!

"On 26 January two French frigates of the Lapérouse expedition sailed into Botany Bay as the British were relocating to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson. The isolation of the Aboriginal people in Australia had finished. European Australia was established in a simple ceremony at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788."
Australian Migration Heritage Centre

British 'convicts' transported "Downunder" from 1787 to 1865.

On 19 October 1800, a French expedition led by Nicholas Baudin, accompanied by zoologists and botanists, set out to map and document the Natural History of “New Holland”. The Freycinet Map of 1811 (enlarge map), the first map of Australia showing the full outline of the continent, was published three years before the publication of Matthew Flinders' map, Terra Australis.

In 1802, Matthew Flinders was the first to circumnavigate the Australian continent. Flinders gave the continent the name “Australia”. Flinders’ map reads: "General chart of Terra Australis or Australia: shows the parts explored between 1798 and 1803 by Matthew Flinders Commander of H.M.S. Investigator."


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On 21st December 1817, Governor Lachlan Macquarie recommended the use of the name “Australia” instead of “New Holland”. The name had been suggested by Matthew Flinders (1774-1814), first English navigator and cartographer to circumnavigate and map Australia, in his sea voyage journal, published in July 1814:

A Voyage to Terra Australis: Undertaken for the Purpose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country, and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802, and 1803, in His Majesty's Ship the Investigator.

A Cargo of Women:
Susannah Watson and the convicts of the Princess Royal
, (1988),
by Babette Smith, traces the history of 100 English women transported to Sydney in 1829, on the ship Princess Royal:
Abstract excerpt:
. . . trapped in the crowded filthy slums of Nottingham, stole because she ‘could not bear to see her children starving'. . . . they become the unwitting and unwilling pioneers of a new land. Many proved to be resourceful and resilient, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by a new society.

Excerpt:
For at least 150 years, Australians have been led to believe that the reason families covered up convict connections--the reason the greater Australian society avoided discussing its convict origins --was an exaggerated form of snobbery by the Australian people.
This presumed shortcoming has been the object of ridicule and even contempt. In fact, . . . at the time, ex-convicts and their families dominated the Australian community. They were not snobbish in hiding their origins. They were scared. . . The women were under intense scrutiny from the beginning of the penal settlements at Botany Bay. Middle-class eyes assessed every move they made, every word they spoke. Words, deeds and appearances were judged and condemned. . .

The early governors of the colony added fuel to the flames. Even Governor Macquarie, who was milder than most about the convicts, described the women as ’so very depraved that they are frequently concerned in the most dreadful acts of atrocity’. Nearly 30 years later, writing just after the Princess Royal deposited its cargo at Sydney, Governor Darling claimed, ‘The women sent out to this country are of the very worst description, not in general being transported until there is no longer any hope of their reformation at home.’ . . . In the colony and in Britain, evangelical clergymen--aided by the Quaker campaigner Elizabeth Fry--raised the issue of the women’s morals to a point where it could not be ignored. Much of their concern was driven by the new proselytising faith, which believed in the potential of reformation of every soul but was prescriptive about what constituted ‘reformation’. Penitence, temperance, chastity, marriage, legitimate children, modesty, obedience, and self-control were the goals . . . pp. 3-4

The Australian Wars
SBS ONDemand
3 Episodes
The story of Australia's first wars, calling for the nation to acknowledge the First Peoples who died in these conflicts...
Rachel Perkins journeys across the country to explore the bloody battles fought on Australian soil and the war that established the Australian nation, seeking to change the narrative of the nation.
SBS Australian Wars


"SENSING the so-called Black War of 1824 was a lost cause, the noble Wiradyuri warrior Windradyne gathered a handful of his surviving people and walked 300 kilometres across the Blue Mountains and into the heart of enemy territory." - Windradyne: warrior who saved his people from genocide, by Andrew Meenahan April 27, 2015, Western Advocate

Windradyne knew that Governor Brisbane spent the summer months at his house at Parramatta (today the grounds of Parramatta Park) and that he played host to the Sydney Aboriginal clans and white settlers at an extravagent Christmas feast. To march 140 of his warriors into British held Parramatta was dangerous, but he also knew that to surrender at the Christmas feast would mean the government wouldn't massacre them.
While the Aboriginal tradition of arriving at somebody else's country in peace necessitated carrying branches, Windradyne instead wore a hat emblazoned with the word "peace". It worked. Brisbane accepted the surrender and pardoned Windradyne. - Stephen Gapps, 2021, Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824, UNSW Press
Dr Stephen Gapps is a Sydney based museum curator and historian working to bring Frontier Wars histories into broader recognition as Australia’s Resistance Wars.
Q&A with Stephen Gapps
Australian Policy and History (APH), June 7, 2022
Australian Historian, Assoc. Professor Kristyn Harman interviews Stephen Gapps, author of Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2021).

Excerpts:
Q. In a similar vein, Australia’s frontier wars have been represented as localised conflicts between small groups of Aboriginal people and British colonists. Yet you have shown in Gudyarra that at times large warbands comprising people, including women, from numerous Aboriginal groups came together to fight against the invaders. How might recognition of such warbands change our understandings of conflicts such as the Wiradyuri war of resistance?

A. Understanding the role of what we might call ‘warbands’ as military units is I believe critical in understanding the warfare during Australia’s colonial resistance wars. Indeed, understanding the adaptation of systems of traditional Aboriginal warfare has until recently been limited. Historians such as Angus Murray and Ray Kerkhove in particular are asking us to think about the military organisation and tactics of warriors – and one element of this is how a family, clan or several allied clan groups were, in times of total war, all involved in conflict.

Traditional alliances were formed in resistance warfare, and there are examples of traditional enmities being left aside as well. The numbers of Wiradyuri warbands were regularly reported as being in the hundreds – and that was usually only reporting the male warriors, not the entire warband group. When thousands of warriors are allied in a state of war, as was the case in 1824 in Bathurst, attacking colonists on multiple fronts and locations across a vast area, the idea of ‘small, localised’ conflict soon dissipates.

Q. You’ve highlighted how it suited British colonists to see Wiradyuri people and other Aboriginal peoples as being not at all warlike. Why is it so important to dispel this lingering myth in Australia today?

A. I think it is important to highlight the complexities of what ‘war’ meant, and means, in both colonial society and Aboriginal societies. As the Wiradyuri showed, the idea of total war was not anathema to them. Yet traditional Aboriginal society placed a strong emphasis on protocols and ways of avoiding all-out conflict. I think we need to carefully consider how colonists may have wanted to view Aboriginal people as not ‘warlike’ in order to suggest they were better off being colonised, and how contemporary ideas of war being brought upon Aboriginal people may lead to thinking they were always peaceful. The difference lies I think in conquest, in colonisation. The Wiradyuri seem to have generally accepted, if not welcomed the Europeans from 1815 to 1821, but when the juggernaut of the land rush and massive numbers of sheep and cattle were pushed onto Wiradyuri Country from 1821, the calls by Wiradyuri people to ‘tumble down white fellow’ can only be seen as all-out resistance to the invasion of their lands, or resistance war. If we don’t recognise this as resistance warfare today, we fail to understand these historical calls; what I believe were in effect declarations of war, to ‘tumble down white fellows’. >>>more

Part 4
White Australia Policy
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"Not really one of us."

Fear of invasion by "Asian hoards"
English colonisers of Australia were fearful of being outnumbering by proximity to the powerful “sleeping giant” of Asia.

Christine Bolt in “Victorian Attitudes to Race” London, 1971 (pdf) bemoaned the lack of scholarly observation and study of man in Victorian England.
Excerpt:

"THE STUDY of race has become a substantial academic industry, and it is heartening that historians have begun to contribute to an enterprise hitherto largely monopolized by social scientists. Racist attitudes being founded on irrational prejudices, are not easily subjected to scientific analysis. But historians who are experienced in assessing men's actions and alibis can make a useful comment, if not a definitive statement, on the subject."

Like the Americans, from the mid-1800s, the Australian colonies passed legislation restricting non-European immigrants– including Chinese, Japanese, and South Pacific Islanders.

The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (commonly known as the White Australia Policy), which was designed to prevent all non-Europeans from settling in Australia, was one of the first acts of commonwealth legislation after Federation in 1901.

Edmund Barton served as The Commonwealth of Australia's first Federation Prime Minister from 1 Jan. 1901 to 24 Sept. 1903.

Australia's 2nd Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin served from 1903-1910, and while his understanding of the Progressive Era's Classical Political Economic Theorem was central to the establishment of the Australian Tax Office (1910), he, too, feared the "Asian hordes" and campaigned strongly for the White Australia policy. In his 1903 Election speech, he proclaimed that the policy was not only for the preservation of the 'complexion' of Australia but it was for the establishment of 'social justice'.

Australia’s 8th Prime Minister, in office from 1923 to 1929, Stanley Bruce, too, was an advocated of the White Australia policy:
Excerpt from his 1928 campaign speech:

“It is necessary that we should determine what are the ideals towards which every Australian would desire to strive. I think those ideals might well be stated as being to secure our national safety, and to ensure the maintenance of our White Australia Policy to continue as an integral portion of the British Empire. We intend to keep this country white and not allow its people to be faced with the problems that at present are practically insoluble in many parts of the world.”

"Born to rule"
Dr. Philip Griffiths' overview of Australian "ruling class agendas" includes his 2006 ANU Doctoral Dissertation, The making of White Australia: Ruling class agendas, 1876-1888.
Excerpt:

“the white population were not very certain that they might not have to defend themselves by force of arms.” (p.119)
. . . Many Europeans in the North had armed themselves, with the full knowledge that they would, sooner or later, have to defend themselves. It had been stated that the Chinese were occupying only places which had been abandoned by the European diggers; but this was wrong, and if the Chinese still congregated in such numbers in the gullies of the Palmer, Europeans would not long remain, and the whole country before long would be occupied by the Chinese. These were the really serious facts of the question they had to deal with. Chinese people as a strategic threat. . . But the widespread agreement within the ruling class, that significant numbers of Chinese immigrants would be a real danger—a position taken by both supporters and opponents of restriction, suggests that there was something more than racist paranoia involved. It is in this sense that there was a ruling class logic to their fear of Chinese immigration.
Philip Griffiths, 2006, p. 127

"The making of White Australia" (1973)
by Australian Historian Donald M. Gibb, (1937-2018 - Obituary) states: "Effective immigration restrictions required joint colonial action.
The difficulty of achieving this without federation was strong argument for federation."
This 1973 White Paper was prepared for the Whitlam government and pubished by the Victorian Historical Association,
La Trobe University Press
Excerpt from the Preface:

It is clearly tempting to apply the judgements of our own times on race to the late nineteenth century without first trying to recreate historically the period we are discussing. If we apply current definitions of racism, then practically all nineteenth century Australian colonists qualify because they showed ‘a ethno-centric pride’ in their ‘own racial group and a preference for the distinctive characteristics of that group’. Further, they often believed that ‘these characteristics’ were ‘fundamentally biological in nature and . . . thus transmitted to succeeding generations.’ They showed ‘strong negative feelings towards other groups who did not share those characteristics, coupled with the thrust to discriminate against and exclude the out-group from full participation in the life of the community.’ - Donald M. Gibb, 1973

Parliamentary documentary history:
Federation and the Geographies of Whiteness
-
a comprehensive overview:
"Within China's Orbit? China through the eyes of the Australian Parliament

"Let us keep before us the noble idea of a white Australia— snow-white Australia if you will. Let it be pure and spotless." - James Black Ronald, ‘Immigration Restriction Bill’, House of Representatives, Debates, 11 September 1901, p. 4666.
Chapter One: Federation and the Geographies of Whiteness

CH 1. Excerpts:
Australian citizenship was not legally defined until the Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1948, which subsequently became the Australian Citizenship Act.[3] Up until this time, a non-British subject acquired British subject status by naturalisation. In most instances this entitled a person to all the rights and privileges, as well as the obligations, of a British-born subject.[4] In the pre-Federation period this was regulated by the colonies through a raft of legislation prohibiting the Chinese from becoming naturalised.[5] After Federation, naturalisation would be governed by the Naturalisation Act of 1903, under which indigenous people from Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands (excepting New Zealand) were prohibited from becoming British subjects. While naturalisations granted prior to Federation were valid under Commonwealth law, those Chinese who did not, or could not, become naturalised had no claim upon the state, and as such faced uncertain futures.

Using this account of Chinese civic patriotism as a starting point, this chapter examines the debates associated with the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. . .

Motivations for Federation
There were at least four motivations for Federation: removing the divisions that separated the colonies; creating unified immigration legislation that would restrict the entry of non-Europeans; the establishment of tariff barriers to protect Australian workers and manufacturers from foreign competition; and the creation of a nation that would provide the citizenry with the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of a democratic political life. While the protectionist platform extended from barring the entry of cheap manufactured goods to barring the entry of cheap labour, at the heart of the federalist movement was the intention to establish a new nation defined in racial terms. . . .

Fear of Degeneration and the Dilution of Whiteness
The late nineteenth century concept of race was powerful and pervasive and resulted in actively discriminatory social practices. Popular understandings about the hierarchy of the races borrowed heavily from evolutionary models. Whites were placed at the apex of the racial hierarchy (while ties to Britain offered a heightened sense of racial and imperial legitimacy). ‘Asiatics’ were clearly inferior to whites, Pacific islanders were inferior to Asiatics and indigenous Australians were considered little more than a dying breed—an example of predestined extinction.
 >>> more

Part 5
"Walkabout" to Cultural Discovery

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The Dreamtime
"Dreaming is the word used to explain how life came to be; it is the stories and beliefs behind creation."

"The great Australian silence"
Australian anthropologist, William E.H. Stanner (1905-1982) worked extensively with Indigenous Australians. "Stanner was an influential figure prior to the successful 1967 referendum on Aboriginal affairs."
- Windschuttle, Keith (May 2009), Bill Stanner and the end of Aboriginal high culture, Quadrant. 

W.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. Without condescension and without sentimentality, in essays such as 'The Dreaming' Stanner conveyed the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture. In his Boyer Lectures he exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale,' regarding the fate of the Aborigines, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'.  …

The Dreaming & Other Essays (1953), W.E.H.Stanner, BlackInc. Books
Excerpts from Google Books scan

“The ideas of absolute extinction and of indestructible soul or spirit may both be found in the belief system.” p. 55

The Australian Aboriginal’ outlook on the universe and man is shaped by a remarkable conception, which Spencer and Gillen immortalised as ‘the dream time’ … I prefer to call it what many Aborigines cal it in English: The Dreaming, or just, Dreaming.
A central meaning of The Dreaming is that a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning. I have never been able to discover any Aboriginal word for time as an abstract concept. And the sense of ‘history’ is wholly alien here. We shall not understand The Dreaming fully except as a complex of meanings. A black fellow man call his totem, or the place from which his spirit came, his Dreaming. He may also explain the existence of a custom, or law of life, as causally due to The Dreaming.” “The ideas of absolute extinction and of indestructible soul or spirit may both be found in the belief system.” p. 57

Indigenous Rites of Passage into Manhood
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The popular story, "The Children" (London, 1959), by English journalist D. G. Payne, published under a pseudonym, was rereleased under the title "Walkabout" by Penguin Australia in 1963 and 1973.
(Read Chapter One & Two HERE)
The 1971 film, Walkabout took up the same story: two American children survived a plane crash in the desert are saved by a boy on "walkabout" played by legendary actor David Gulpill (1953-2021).

Memorising - a 'rite of passage' before 'going walkabout'
Boys, age 10 to 16, were prepared for their 'rite of passage' as a 'journey into manhood' by memorising a song that mapped their chosen route, describing geographic terrains, with multi-language verses identifying neighbouring tribal border lands, so that when they were heard, they were welcomed, rather than feared.
In a word "songlines'!

Songlines: inspired by elaboration on a theme:

"in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors sang it."

"Songlines" (1987), by British travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
Considered controversial at the time of publication, Chatwin has since received high praise for his tireless efforts.
"his bravest work yet... No one will put it down unmoved."
- New York Times book review
- Complete book scanned in PDF format here:
- The Chatwin Papers HERE
- LitBlog curriculum notes HERE
Chatwin explored the logic behind the tradition, as a retelling of the story told to him on his arrival in Australia:

Excerpt: pp. 14-16
My reason for coming to Australia was to try to learn for myself, and not from others, what a songline was--and how it worked. Obviously, I was not going to get to the heart of the matter, nor would I want to. I had asked a friend in Adelaide if she knew of an expert . . .
He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between far-flung tribes.

'A song', he said, 'was both a map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.'
'And would a man on "Walkabout" always be travelling down one of the Songlines?'
'In the old days, yes,' he agreed. 'Noadays, they go by train or car.'
'Suppose the man strayed from his Songlines?'
"He was trespassing. He might get speared for it.' . . .

In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock of creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualise the Songlines as a spaghetti of Illiads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every ‘episode’ was readable in terms of geology.

'By episode’, I asked, ‘do you mean “sacred site”?’
‘I do.’ . . .
‘And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song? . . .’

By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poses, meaning ‘creation.’ No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went ‘Walkabout’ was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor’s stanzas without changing a word or note--and so recreated the Creation.

’Sometimes … we’ll come across a ridge or sandhills, and suddenly they’ll all start singing. “What are you mob singing?” I’ll ask, and they’ll say, “Singing up the country, boss. Makes the country come up quicker”.’ … just us, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors sang it.

‘So the land', I said, 'must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?'
'True.'
'In Other words, "to exist" is "to be perceived"?'
'Yes.'
'Sounds suspiciously like Bishop Berkeley's Refutation of Matter.
Or Pure Mind Buddhism. . . which also sees the world as an illusion.'

"Sojourners" - another word for "Walkabout"
- a longer song in many languages:
Eric Rolls' Sojourners, 1992

SOJOURNERS: the epic story of China's centuries-old relationship with Australia: flowers and the wide sea (1992), by Eric C. Rolls AM (1923-2007). 
Summary: "The story of China's centuries old relationship with Australia. Covers important themes of gambling, health and sickness. . . includes discussion of very early Chinese contact with northern Australia; trade in trepang (beche-de-mer) between the Aboriginal people of east Arnhem Land, the Macassans and Chinese traders."

"Australia and China lay side by side for 300 million years. They drifted apart for millions more, and now, so geologists believe, they are moving back towards one another at the rate of a few centimetres a year. Within imaginable time, some anthropologists believe, the slight, thin-boned Peking man sailed down to Australia in well-built rafts, mixed with a sturdy Indonesian people who were already here and engendered the Aborigine."
- Eric C. Rolls (1923-2007), Sojourners, 1992, p. 2.


In Recovery: The Stolen Generation
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From the mid-1800s to the 1970s, "half-cast" children,
"The Stolen Generation" were placed in reservations,
aka Stations.

"Please would you allow me to have my two daughters with me here [another] one of them died and I have not seen her before she died and I should like the other two, to be with me and comfort me.
Please do not dissapoint me for my heart is breaking to have them with me. Please to send them up here as I cannot leave the station.
Please ask Mr. Stahl to let them come."

Margaret Harrison, Aboriginal Resident of Ebenezer Station in 1884.

“Couldn’t be Fairer” (1984)
See the full Documentary here - under 50 min.
3 clips: Discovery is just a word; The Aboriginal problem; Sacred tree.
This film, to some degree, is a tribute to Mick Miller, who was committed to fighting for the rights of Indigenous peoples.

"Couldn’t Be Fairer offers good historical footage, and allows the audience to gauge the shifting social frameworks over the years that allowed racist views to be expressed quite openly." - Curator Dr Romaine Moreton

Stolen Generations
Find & Connect archive
Summary: The Stolen Generations are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who, when they were children, were taken away from their families and communities as the result of past government policies. Children were removed by governments, churches and welfare bodies to be brought up in institutions, fostered out or adopted by white families. The removal of Aboriginal children took place from the early days of British colonisation in Australia. It broke important cultural, spiritual and family ties and has left a lasting and intergenerational impact on the lives and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

1993
"Contributing to the reconciliation process."
"My heart is breaking"
A Joint Guide to the Records About Aboriginal People in The Public Record Office of Victoria and the Australian Archives, Victorian Regional Office
, published in 1993, the International Year for the World's Indigenous People.

Bringing them Home:
Fact sheet:
What was the Bringing Them Home report? (pdf)

The Bringing Them Home Report:
1995:
In 1995 a National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families (pdf) commenced, headed by the President of the Human Rights and Equality Commission, Sir Ronald Wilson.

1996:
By the end of 1996 nearly 800 submissions had been heard.

1997:
In April 1997, the Commission handed down the report, Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, containing 54 recommendations.

On 26 May 1997 the "Bringing them Home" report was tabled in Parliament.

"For individuals, their removal as children and the abuse they experienced at the hands of the authorities or their delegates have permanently scarred their lives. The harm continues in later generations, affecting their children and grandchildren....
…the past is very much with us today, in the continuing devastation of the lives of Indigenous Australians. That devastation cannot be addressed unless the whole community listens with an open heart and mind to the stories of what has happened in the past and, having listened and understood, commits itself to reconciliation.

Bringing them home: The 'Stolen Children' report (1997). The Australian Human Rights Commission's extensive resource includes
The 54 recommendations of the report

Rabbit-Proof Fence
The celebrated 2002 film
, with Kenneth Branagh in the role of "chief protector of Aborigines," A. O. Neville.
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) review:
Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the true story of Molly, Gracie and Daisy - three Aboriginal girls in Western Australia, 1931, who are forcibly abducted from their mothers.
Based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara, the film was released in Australia in February 2002. It introduced many people to the concept of the 'stolen generations’: Aboriginal children who were removed from their families as the result of government policies.
This curated collection includes clips from the film, interviews with director Phillip Noyce and actress Deborah Mailman, behind-the-scenes stills, international film posters, and documents donated to the NFSA by writer-producer Christine Olsen.  >>>more

IMDB movie storyline
Western Australia, 1931.
Government policy includes taking half-caste children from their Aboriginal mothers and sending them a thousand miles away to what amounts to indentured servitude, "to save them from themselves." Molly, Daisy, and Grace (two sisters and a cousin who are 14, 10, and arrive at their Gulag and promptly escape, under Molly's lead. For days they walk north, following a fence that keeps rabbits from settlements, eluding a native tracker and the regional constabulary. Their pursuers take orders from the government's "chief protector of Aborigines," A.O. Neville, blinded by Anglo-Christian certainty, evolutionary worldview and conventional wisdom.

The last line says it all:
'Their pursuers take orders from the government's "chief protector of Aborigines," A. O. Neville, blinded by Anglo-Christian certainty, evolutionary worldview and conventional wisdom' - following treatments of 'transportees' - nla.gov.au

Part 6
Legendary Australians
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Lowitja O'Donoghue
Legendary Australian public administrator and Indigenous rights advocate,
Dr. Lowitja O'Donoghue, AC, CBE, DSG, AC, CBE, DSG, (b. 1 August 1932-) also known as Lois O'Donoghue and Lois Smart. In 1990–1996 she was the inaugural chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC - 1990-2005). Celebrated for her long-standing leadership, she has received at least six honorary doctorates from Australian universities.
In December 1992, O'Donoghue became the first Aboriginal Australian to address the United Nations General Assembly during the launch of the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Peoples (1993).
"Following the 1992 Mabo decision by the High Court of Australia, O'Donoghue was a leading member of the team negotiating with the federal government relating to native title in Australia. Together with prime minister Paul Keating, she played a major role in drafting the bill which became the Native Title Act 1993, and Keating shortlisted her for the position of Governor-General of Australia in 1995." -Wikipedia

Be Fearless: Lowitja O'Donoghue speaks from the Heart (0:39)
September 2023
Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue AC CBE DSG has dedicated her life to campaigning for recognition and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to be heard. Her words have inspired a generation of Australians:
"Stand up and be counted, we want to hear your voices"


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Gary Foley - Remembering 1972
"There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of ones native land."
- Euripides 431 B.C.
Koorie Project
Gary Foley was born in 1950, in Grafton, NSW) of Gumbainggir descent.
Foley became a leader in the "black power" movement in Redfern, Sydney, where he co-founded the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, in 1972. In that same year, Foley was appointed a public relations officer in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. "He was fired from the Department after just six weeks, after three warnings, and then secretary Barrie Dexter urged ASIO to spy on Foley." - Paul Daly, The Guardian, 2015. He went on to earn academic qualifications from 2000, majoring in History Cultural Studies, and gained a Ph.D in History in 2013. In 2022, he was appointed Professor, at Victoria University, Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Unit. He is the curator of The Koorie History Website: The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies' Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia.

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Kath Walker / Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993)
“In the 1960s Kath Walker — poet, activist, educator, environmentalist, and public speaker — articulated the feelings of Aboriginal people for the rest of Australia in a way that they had not heard before.”
- ANU Biography

Kath Walker
aka Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Kath Walker


Song of Hope

Look up, my people,
The dawn is breaking
The world is waking
To a bright new day
When none defame us
No restriction tame us
Nor colour shame us
Nor sneer dismay.

Now brood no more
On the years behind you
The hope assigned you
Shall the past replace
When a juster justice
Grown wise and stronger
Points the bone no longer
At a darker race.

So long we waited
Bound and frustrated
Till hate be hated
And caste deposed
Now light shall guide us
No goal denied us
And all doors open
That long were closed.

See plain the promise
Dark freedom-lover!
Night's nearly over
And though long the climb
New rights will greet us
New mateship meet us
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.

To our fathers' fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children's children
the glad tomorrow.

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Kev Carmody
Indigenous songwriter Kev Carmody opens up
about his secret stolen childhood

ABC News, 28 June 2022

Excerpt:
Australian songwriting legend Kev Carmody has shared fascinating details of his secret childhood and eventual discovery by the authorities, all of which occurred long before he ever uttered the phrase "from little things, big things grow".
The 76-year-old giant of the Australian music scene has become one of the biggest names in the Aboriginal rights protest movement, instantly recognisable by his unruly grey hair, red-cloth headband and distinctive voice.
His early life as part of the Stolen Generation is well-documented, but the formative years leading up to his forced removal from his parents are lesser known.
Carmody's story starts in 1946 when he was born in Cairns, the son of second-generation Irish-Australian Francis John "Jack" Carmody and an Aboriginal woman named Bonny.
>>>more

Kev Carmody
 

Thou shalt not steal
by singer/songwriter Kev Carmody: 1989 album "Pillars of Society"

In 1788 down Sydney Cove
The first boat-people land
Said sorry boys our gain's your loss
We gonna steal your land
And if you break our new British laws
For sure you're gonna hang
Or work your life like convicts
With chains on your neck and hands
CHORUS
They taught us
Oh Oh Black woman thou shalt not steal
Oh Oh Black man thou shalt not steal
We're gonna civilize
Your Black barbaric lives
And teach you how to kneel
But your history couldn't hide
The genocide
The hypocrisy to us was real
'cause your Jesus said
you're supposed to give the oppressed
a better deal
We say to you yes whiteman thou shalt not steal
Oh ya our land you'd better heal

Your science and technology
Hey you can make a nuclear bomb
Development has increased the size to 3,000,000 megatons
But if you think that's progress
I suggest your reasoning is unsound
You shoulda found out long ago
You best keep it in the ground

Job and me and Jesus sittin'
Underneath the Indooroopilly bridge
Watchin' that blazin' sun go down
Behind the tall tree'd mountain ridge
The land's our heritage and spirit
Here the rightful culture's Black
and we sittin' here just wonderin'
When we get the land back

You talk of conservation
Keep the forest pristine green
Yet in 200 years your materialism
Has stripped the forests clean
A racist's a contradiction
That's understood by none
Mostly their left hand hold a bible
Their right hand holds a gun

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Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter
Two of Australia's most respected songwriters,
Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter shared a life-long bond.
Ruby Hunter, (31 October 1955 - 17 February, 2010), was eight years old when she was taken from her Aboriginal family in South Australia.
Archie Roach, (8 January, 1956 - 30 July 2022), was three years old when he was taken from his family.
Archie Roach, Took the Children Away, 1990
Ruby Hunter, Down City Streets, 1990
Ruby Hunter, Let My Children Be, 1994
"To call Archie Roach simply a musician, writes Bhiamie Williamson, is to fail to recognise him as a messenger. One of our greatest storytellers, his music
'reaches through darkness like the beam of a lighthouse, offering guidance and safe harbour in times of despair'.
"There’s hope for First Nations affairs to be better addressed with regular Indigenous-led communication with government. I just hope this can help with matters such as the overrepresentation of mob in prisons, our children in out-of-home care, and closing the gap in health and education for our peoples." - Carissa Lee, First Nations and Public Policy Editor, The Conversation


VALE Archie Roach, (8 January, 1956 - 30 July 2022)
, Gunditjmara (Kirrae Whurrong) Djab Wurrung / Bundjalung senior elder - with deep gratitude for his eternal gifts of the heart!
ANU OBITUARY

Tributes
1. Message from Victorian Premier Dan Andrews ~

Few people have put the pain, the suffering, the hope and the pride of Aboriginal people into words like Archie Roach.
His music is remarkable because it tells a remarkable story.
His own story.
When Took The Children Away was performed for the first time it was met with a stunned silence before the raucous applause.
And it would go on to become the first song to ever be recognised with a Human Rights Achievement Award.
He'd release five more albums, poetry, a children's book and his own memoir.
But his impact on our state, and our country is so much greater than the sum of his words.
The proud Gunditjmara (Kirrae Whurrong/Djab Wurrung), Bundjalung man never stopped fighting for the Stolen Generations to be heard, and listened to.
And with Ruby he helped countless Aboriginal children avoid the path he followed as a young man.
Archie changed lives.
And he changed our state.
To Amos, Eban, Kriss, Arthur, Terrence and the whole Roach family – you are in our hearts and our thoughts.

Vale Archie

2. Archie Roach:
the great songman, tender and humble, who gave our people a voice

31 July 2022, by Bhiamie Williamson, Australian National University

"To call Archie Roach simply a musician, writes Bhiamie Williamson, is to fail to recognise him as a messenger. One of our greatest storytellers, his music “reaches through darkness like the beam of a lighthouse, offering guidance and safe harbour in times of despair”.
There’s hope for First Nations affairs to be better addressed with regular Indigenous-led communication with government. I just hope this can help with matters such as the overrepresentation of mob in prisons, our children in out-of-home care, and closing the gap in health and education for our peoples." - Carissa Lee, First Nations and Public Policy Editor, The Conversation

"Took the Children Away" , Archie Roach's debut single was released in September 1990. In 1991, he won the Human Rights Achievement Award, the first time that the award had been bestowed on a songwriter.
In 2020 Archie Roach was inducted to the ARIA Hall of Fame:

Took the Children Away
by singer/songwriter Archie Roach, 1990

This story's right, this story's true
I would not tell lies to you
Like the promises they did not keep
And how they fenced us in like sheep.
Said to us come take our hand
Sent us off to mission land.
Taught us to read, to write and pray
Then they took the children away,
Took the children away,
The children away.
Snatched from their mother's breast
Said this is for the best
Took them away.

The welfare and the policeman
Said you've got to understand
We'll give them what you can't give
Teach them how to really live.
Teach them how to live they said
Humiliated them instead
Taught them that and taught them this
And others taught them prejudice.
You took the children away
The children away
Breaking their mothers heart
Tearing us all apart
Took them away

One dark day on Framingham
Come and didn't give a damn
My mother cried go get their dad
He came running, fighting mad
Mother's tears were falling down
Dad shaped up and stood his ground.
He said 'You touch my kids and you fight me'

And they took us from our family.
Took us away
They took us away
Snatched from our mother's breast
Said this was for the best
Took us away.

Told us what to do and say
Told us all the white man's ways
Then they split us up again
And gave us gifts to ease the pain
Sent us off to foster homes
As we grew up we felt alone
Cause we were acting white
Yet feeling black

One sweet day all the children came back
The children come back
The children come back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back
Said the children come back
The children come back
Back where they understand
Back to their mother's land
The children come back

Back to their mother
Back to their father
Back to their sister
Back to their brother
Back to their people
Back to their land
All the children come back
The children come back
The children come back
Yes I came back.

Archie Roach’s debut studio album, Charcoal Lane,
1990, Mushroom Records,
Track 1,
Native Born

Albert Namatjra painted
Not so much the things he saw
But what he felt inside and how he loved the Flinders Range
The only thing he ever wanted
The reason that he painted for
Was that everybody share the dream
His land would never change

Ah but change it did and through the years
They introduced some foreign plants
Familiar things are strange
While strangers play upon the lawn
And mother land has shed her tears
For lives that never stood a chance
And Albert Namatjra cried, as we all cry

The Native Born

So bow your head old Eucalypt and Wattle Tree
Australia's bush losing its identity
While the cities and the parks that they have planned
Look out of place because the spirit's in the land
Look out of place because the spirit's in the land

Do you remember Joseph Banks?
Who stood upon this sacred earth
And what he felt inside when he looked around and saw
The land to whom we give our thanks
Our mother land who's given birth
To trees and plants and animals he'd never seen before?

So bow your head old Eucalypt and Wattle Tree
Australia's bush losing its identity
While the cities and the parks that they have planned
Look out of place because the spirit's in the land

But no one knows or no one hears
The way we used to sing and dance
And how the Gum Tree stood and stretched to greet the golden morn
And mother land still sheds her tears
For lives that never stood a chance
And Albert Namatjra cried as we all cry

The Native Born

We cry the Native Born


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Pat Dodson - the Father of Reconciliation.
In 2016, Labor Party Member Professor Patrick Dodson (b. 1948-), a Yawuru man from Broome, Western Australia, was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of Western Australia.
“The remarkable story of a truly remarkable man. Pat Dodson will enrich our nation's parliament.” – Bill Shorten MP, March 6, 2016

Professor Patrick Dodson

Aboriginal elder Pat Dodson: portrait of the senator as a young man
by Tony Wright
4 March, 2016
“Everyone knew the Dodson boys would make a name for themselves. But we couldn't have guessed that Pat would become known as the Father of Reconciliation and win the Sydney Peace Prize, or that Mick would become Australian of the Year, and much, much else.
From little things….”
>>> more

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Professor Marcia Langton understands the concept of Rent Seeking

Who’s afraid of Marcia Langton?
by Peter Robb, APRIL 2011, The Monthly

Excerpts: Two very unlike people have been opening up new ways of thinking about Indigenous affairs in Australia during the past several years. . . . Marcia Langton has a longer and more various history than Pearson, and is a lot harder to place. . . . She has pursued an academic career over many years but only when she has had time for it. . . .
The confluence was described the following year by Nicolas Rothwell in the Australian Literary Review. He called Langton’s recent writings “majestic”. They are too, but they also have a fabulously demotic flair, cultivated and street-smart, as Langton always is when not letting herself be shoehorned into academic formats. Her very titles are incomparable. . . . Langton has a way of making you want to read about things you never thought you’d ever want to read about.

She floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee and she terrifies people who have to face her in debate. Especially politicians. She can shift from ex cathedra to street-fighter mode in the blink of an eye. A couple of years ago Langton tangled with Germaine Greer, who was banging on about the racism she imputed to Baz Luhrmann’s outback movie, Australia. Langton pounced on what she called Greer’s “cleverly disguised contempt for Aboriginal people, her desperate need to stereotype Aboriginal victimhood”. It went viral and Langton convinced people, she insists, that Greer was herself being racist. >>> more

Marcia Langton

"It is deeply rooted in the profit-driven economics of expansionist regimes. As Australians, we inherit a criminal legacy of a colonialism that has left an environmental and humanitarian scar that stretches from Ireland, France, Spain , Africa, India, South-East Asia, North America, Australia and New Zealand. All of us should carry this burden, not just the surviving indigenous communities. With awareness, political and financial means, we need to heal these wounds."
James Florence, Australian composer

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