Suchergebnisse

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 terrainlate 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.

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 terrainlate 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.

Colonial exploration continues, all too often, to be rendered as heroic narratives of solitary, intrepid explorers and adventurers. This edited collection contributes to scholarship that is challenging that persistent mythology. With a focus on Indigenous brokers, such as guides, assistants and mediators, it highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century exploration in Australia and New Guinea was a collective and socially complex enterprise. Many of the authors provide biographically rich studies that carefully examine and speculate about Indigenous brokers' motivations, commitments and desires. All of the chapters in the collection are attentive to the specific local circumstances as well as broader colonial contexts in which exploration and encounters occurred. This collection breaks new ground in its emphasis on Indigenous agency and Indigenous–explorer interactions. It will be of value to historians and others for a very long time. Professor Ann Curthoys, University of Sydney. In bringing together this group of authors, the editors have brought to histories of colonialism the individuality of these intermediaries, whose lives intersected colonial exploration in Australia and New Guinea. Dr Jude Philp, Macleay Museum.

Colonial encounters between indigenous peoples and European state powers are overarching themes in the historical archaeology of the modern era, and postcolonial historical archaeology has repeatedly emphasized the complex two-way nature of colonial encounters. This volume examines common trajectories in indigenous colonial histories, and explores new ways to understand cultural contact, hybridization and power relations between indigenous peoples and colonial powers from the indigenous point of view. By bringing together a wide geographical range and combining multiple sources such as oral histories, historical records, and contemporary discourses with archaeological data, the volume finds new multivocal interpretations of colonial histories