This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad settler and Australian legal histories that have shaped their lives and histories since colonisation. I argue that we still need to reckon... more
This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad settler and Australian legal histories that have shaped their lives and histories since colonisation. I argue that we still need to reckon with law because settler law denied Aboriginal land title and continues to deny Aboriginal sovereignty. Tracing settler laws’ complicity with the colonial project, this chapter first examines how the fantasy of terra nullius was instantiated through laws which enabled the expropriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lands and waters. It then examines how First Nations people have been unduly affected by separate, discriminatory settler laws which governed almost all facets of their lives. Yet, Australia’s legal system to redress these injustices, constitutes new and evolving chapters in the nation’s legal history.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial schemes and fashioned himself as an emigration expert. In 1848 he published Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to... more
This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial schemes and fashioned himself as an emigration expert. In 1848 he published Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to 1847, followed by a number of emigrant guides to the individual Australian colonies, the Cape of Good Hope and Port Natal. Descriptions of indigenous peoples proliferate throughout Byrne’s guides. While his texts were informed by his own travels, he also quoted liberally from official correspondence, newspapers, and other contemporary works. His accounts reflect both his own opinions, and also a broad spectrum of imperial attitudes and approaches towards Indigenous peoples. This article explores Byrne’s ideas of how Indigenous peoples might best serve the interest of British emigrants: that is how they might or might not be made ‘useful’ to British subjects, and also, in some cases, how their inevitable demise would provide ‘peculiar advantages to emigrants’. His accounts of Indigenous people illustrate the problems posed by the ‘native question’ in imperial thinking, and the way in which Britain grappled to envisage the future place of indigenous people within its colonies in the face of growing settler demands for land.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) is a new Australian Research Council-funded research project I am leading with Malcolm Allbrook and Tom Griffiths, which seeks to redress the long-standing underrepresentation of... more
An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) is a new Australian Research Council-funded research project I am leading with Malcolm Allbrook and Tom Griffiths, which seeks to redress the long-standing underrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) by doubling the number of Indigenous biographies within the online ADB, and producing a stand-alone published volume of Indigenous short biographies. Yet, rather than just producing 190 new entries, our aim is also to rethink how Indigenous biographies can be conceptualised, being attentive to how and why Indigenous biography is distinctive, and how Indigenous people, who have long been marginalised and excluded from the national imaginary, can now be better accommodated with the ADB, and hence be better incorporated within the national story.
Research Interests:
Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to interpret the colonial cultures and histories of former British colonies where Indigenous people have since become a marginalised minority in... more
Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to interpret the colonial cultures and histories of former British colonies where Indigenous people have since become a marginalised minority in their own homelands, ‘replaced’ by European settlers who sought to ‘eliminate’ them and their connections to the land. Yet, in recent years this approach has been subject to more critical evaluations, key amongst them, by some First Nations scholars. In this article I explore how Indigenous scholars advocate, interrogate, critique or challenge settler colonial studies as an emerging field of enquiry. I conclude by discussing Indigenous-authored extra-colonial histories, which bypass colonial expropriation and exploitation to focus on Indigenous worlds.
Research Interests:
This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the history of cross-cultural encounters. Rather than focusing on face-to-face interactions, it examines how emotions governed European engagements... more
This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the history of cross-cultural encounters. Rather than focusing on face-to-face interactions, it examines how emotions governed European engagements with Aboriginal cultural landscapes and shaped Europeans' imaginings of how places could be constituted as sacred. It looks specifically at the writings of François Péron, one of the scientific crew of the Baudin expedition, a French Revolutionary voyage that visited Australia and Timor between 1801 and 1803. During the explora tion of Australia the French expedition discovered two Aboriginal places that were interpreted as religiously significant to the local people: a grove discovered at Geographe Bay in the southwest of Australia and two tombs found at Maria Island off the southeast of Tasmania. Péron's extended discussion of these Aboriginal sites highlights the significance of emotions in the construction of ethnographic accounts, as well as the role of emotions in transcultural perceptions of place.
Research Interests:
In Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista (eds), 'Indigenous Conversations about Biography', special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, Summer 2016, pp. 410-428.
Research Interests:
In Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (eds), Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives, ANU Press, Canberra, 2015.
Research Interests:
in Rachel Standfield (ed.), Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ANU Press, Canberra, 2018.
Research Interests:
In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
Research Interests:
In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In 1995 Ann Curthoys and Clive Moore published “Working for the White People”, a key essay on Indigenous labour historiography. They called for scholars to consider the history of Indigenous people's experience of work in terms of labour... more
In 1995 Ann Curthoys and Clive Moore published “Working for the White People”, a key essay on Indigenous labour historiography. They called for scholars to consider the history of Indigenous people's experience of work in terms of labour and not race relations. In this special issue devoted to celebrating Ann Curthoys' career, we take up the challenge by writing a history of the Torres Strait Islanders who moved to the mainland to work on the construction of the railways to service the burgeoning mining industry in the 1960s, a period commemorated in Islander communities as “railway time”. In our study of Indigenous labour and mobility we focus on the experiences of a particular Islander man, John Culear Kennell Snr, who worked as a labourer, team leader and recruiter of other Islanders in Queensland and Western Australia.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This issue of Studies of Australasian Cinema focuses on Baz Luhrmann's blockbuster film Australia (2008). Included is a selection of articles based on papers that were originally presented at the Baz... more
This issue of Studies of Australasian Cinema focuses on Baz Luhrmann's blockbuster film Australia (2008). Included is a selection of articles based on papers that were originally presented at the Baz Luhrmann's Australia Reviewed conference held at the National Museum of Australia ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Louis Nowra's recently published Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children (2007) includes an ethno-historical study of gender relations in Aboriginal ‘traditional’ society, drawing on early explorers’... more
Louis Nowra's recently published Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children (2007) includes an ethno-historical study of gender relations in Aboriginal ‘traditional’ society, drawing on early explorers’ observations and anthropological accounts. Inga Clendinnen likewise included a chapter on Aboriginal sexual politics in Dancing with Strangers (2003). This paper critiques their conclusions and methods, and closely analyses the same terrain—late eighteenth-century European representations of Aboriginal sexual relations. My aim is not to deny that there were instances of violence in the sexual conduct of eighteenth-century Aboriginal societies. Instead, this paper demonstrates that Nowra and Clendinnen's ethno-histories fail to present a holistic account of the myriad descriptions of Indigenous gender dynamics that permeate the European explorers’ accounts.