Papers by Tiffany Shellam
Westerly, Nov 10, 2012
This article examines a conciliation narrative at King George Sound in Western Australia that ori... more This article examines a conciliation narrative at King George Sound in Western Australia that originated in the early nineteenth century during an era of European exploration when explorers had fleeting meetings with the Mineng. This friendship narrative has been continually re-presented and inscribed by settlers and later by historians without its imperial power dynamic being critiqued. This essay attempts a genealogy of this friendship motif as well as exploring the destablising of this narrative by writers and community members. This essay also suggests ways of decolonising this narrative and searches for alternative emotions from this frontier.
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Studies in Western Australian History, 2010
Greg Dening wrote often on the practice of history being a constant dialogue between the past and... more Greg Dening wrote often on the practice of history being a constant dialogue between the past and the present. I want to add another dialogue. Sam Wineburg and Richard White have respectively written that when we write histories there is always a tension between ...
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Australian Historical Studies, Jun 1, 2013
This is a long peer-reviewed exhibition review of 'Bungaree: The First Australian', an ex... more This is a long peer-reviewed exhibition review of 'Bungaree: The First Australian', an exhibition curated by Indigenous artist, Djon Mundine. This review discusses the artwork and the historical re-imagining that the artwork and the exhibition as a collection explores, particularly the use of irony and humour. In discussing the curatorship, this article also suggests links with other Indigenous curatorship epistemologies in other places, focusing on the workshops, lectures, artists in residence programs that enabled the artists to work and think in-situ. This article also reveiws the current historiography on Bungaree.
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Public History Review, Dec 31, 2013
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Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2019
Abstract:In the State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA) is a 30-page file which include... more Abstract:In the State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA) is a 30-page file which includes a petition letter that was scripted on behalf of two Nyungar men, Tommy Dower and Johnny Carroll, in November 1886. The petition was supported by the signatures of 47 settlers of the Swan River Colony. In the archive today, the petition is considered to be an "orphan letter," with no family to connect it to. This article explores a methodology still in development for re-reading and re-contextualising Nyungar letters when a letter cannot be connected to a Nyungar descendant. By focusing on contemporary Nyungar heritage, working closely with archivists at SROWA, and guided by a Nyungar Elder, I unpack this petition letter and the histories of the petitioners through a collective framework established by the ARC Linkage Project Ancestors Words: Nyungar writing in WA Archives, 1860–1960.
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Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2019
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Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015
These words were penned in 1867 by Father Venancio Garrido, a Benedictine monk at New Norcia Abor... more These words were penned in 1867 by Father Venancio Garrido, a Benedictine monk at New Norcia Aboriginal mission in Western Australia (see Map 4.1). They form part of his lengthy report on the mission which was requested by the Colonial Secretary to be forwarded to the Aborigines Protection Society in London. In 1871 Father Garrido’s report was collated alongside other ‘information’ about Aborigines in Western Australia that had been collected by missionaries and government agents, and was printed by the government printer. The above statement suggests two issues which I will draw out in this chapter: the Aboriginal residents at New Norcia had a strong sense of right and wrong; and the Benedictine community at New Norcia considered them to be the original owners of the land which was, in 1867, increasingly occupied by pastoralists.
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Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2012
This paper investigates the Western Australian colonial authorities' attempts at defining and... more This paper investigates the Western Australian colonial authorities' attempts at defining and categorising a "politically relevant" Aboriginal population from first settlement in 1829 until 1850. Studies of colonial enumeration allow us to understand how colonial authorities viewed the spaces and boundaries of settlement and beyond, and who would be included as part of the community inhabiting that space. Enumeration of Aboriginal people in this period mirrored the Western Australian colonial authorities' conception of their sovereignty: the territory which they could effectively control was not the entire western third of the continent, as the map dictated, but rather the surveyed country, within the "limits of settlement." While other studies of colonial census making reveal enumeration as an instrument of control, this paper identifies colonial census making about Indigenous Western Australians in this period as an instance of state incapacity to govern and control. While "control" was the colonial authorities' key objective in their enumerations, the census reports reveal their inability to know the Aboriginal population.
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ANU Press eBooks, Apr 27, 2016
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History Australia, 2012
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Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Mar 31, 2015
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History and Anthropology, Mar 1, 2007
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History Australia, Feb 9, 2021
Nineteenth-century protection policies were not created in colonial Australia but were an ‘adapta... more Nineteenth-century protection policies were not created in colonial Australia but were an ‘adaptation of practices’ from earlier empires to regulate relations. This idea is central to Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, a history of ‘protection’ and reform of Aboriginal people within the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and, to a smaller extent, New Zealand. In the book, Nettelbeck shows how imperial humanitarianism was a ‘co-initiative’ to check the impacts of violence and dispossession in settler colonies and a system to govern and control the Crown’s Indigenous subjects. This system had a long history, stretching back to the sixteenth century and forwards to the 1960s in Australia. Nettelbeck shows clearly the importance of that wider context. In doing so, she emphasises the entwined purposes of protectors in improving the Indigenous ‘condition’ and stabilising the ‘colonised legal order’. This dual purpose, Nettelbeck argues, was often in tension – a tension with its own long history in similar protectorate offices across empires. Nettelbeck’s skill in deep and wide historical research across colonial sites and empires has shaped a book that is rewarding to read. She positions protection policies in the Australian colonies within their long histories of regulating colonial worlds and ‘consolidating governmental authority through the mechanism of law’ (3). While Aboriginal ‘protection’ (always written within quotation marks to further reveal her argument of its farce) in Australia is Nettelbeck’s focus, she contextualises this within the relevant history of the empire and other arenas of historical protection. Offices of ‘Protection’ were already part of the ‘toolbox of empire’. Debates of the 1830s are a particular focus in this meticulously researched book. Nettelbeck skilfully weaves discussion between the contexts of metropole and colony and diverse colonial situations to reveal the influence of personnel who operated across these sites in the development of protection policies. This also highlights the tensions between the metropolitan observers at a distance with the reality of those in the field. The Select Committee of 1835 and subsequent 1837 Report get necessary attention, but not at the cost of related debates put forward by those within or close to Evangelical circles. Nettelbeck
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Papers by Tiffany Shellam
These intermediaries are rarely the authors of exploration narratives, or the main focus within exploration archives. Nonetheless the archives of exploration contain imprints of their presence, experience and contributions. The chapters present a range of ways of reading archives to bring them to the fore. The contributors ask new questions of existing materials, suggest new interpretive approaches, and present innovative ways to enhance sources so as to generate new stories.