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This article offers a critical exploration of social studies textbooks and allied curriculum materials used in New South Wales primary schools between 1930 and 1960, and of the way in which these texts positioned, discussed, and assessed Aboriginal Australians. With reference to European commitments to Enlightenment philosophies and social Darwinian views of race and culture, the author argues that Aboriginal peoples were essentialized via a discourse of paternalism and cultural and biological inferiority. Thus othered in narratives of Australian identity and national progress, Aboriginal Australians were ascribed a role as marginalized spectators or as a primitive and disappearing anachronism.

Time Before Morning: Art and Myth of the Australian Aborigines. Louis A. Allen.Australian Aboriginal Mythology. L. R. Hiatt, ed.The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of Their Society. Kenneth Maddock.

SummaryThis study examines data from 15,172 episodes of hospitalization pertaining to Aboriginal Australians discharged from public and private hospitals in New South Wales during 1978. Morbidity patterns revealed provide quantitative evidence on a whole population basis for the often impressionistic statements of those dealing with limited areas or with specific diseases.Respiratory diseases are by far the most common and their occurrence seems to be out of proportion in relation to other diagnoses. Gastrointestinal and diarrhoeal diseases are important among young children, alcoholism among men, and diabetes among older people of both sexes. The most common surgical procedures involved abdomen, female genitals and ear, nose and throat.It was noted that for most disease categories Aborigines were more likely to be hospitalized than non-Aborigines, the major exception being neoplasms. On the other hand, Aborigines were significantly less likely to be hospitalized for surgical operations. Overall, Aborigines were found to suffer higher levels of ill-health primarily due to their depressed economic conditions and social exclusion as well as racial discrimination to which they are commonly subjected in Australia.

The long history of Asian contact with Australian Aborigines began with the early links with seafarers, Makassan trepang gatherers and even Chinese contact, which occurred in northern Australia. Later contact through the pearling industry in the Northern Territory and Kimberley, Western Australia, involved Filipinos (Manilamen), Malays, Indonesians, Chinese and Japanese. Europeans on the coastal areas of northern Australia depended on the work of indentured Asians and local Aborigines for the development and success of these industries. The birth of the Australian Federation also marked the beginning of the "White Australia Policy" designed to keep non-Europeans from settling in Australia. The presence of Asians in the north had a significant impact on state legislation controlling Aborigines in Western Australia in the first half of the 20th century, with implications to the present. Oral and archival evidence bears testimony to the brutality with which this legislation was pursued and its impact on the lives of Aboriginal people.

AbstractOntological parochialism persists in International Relations (IR) scholarship among gestures towards relational ontological reinvention. Meanwhile, the inter-polity relations of many Indigenous peoples pre-date contemporary IR and tend to be substantively relational. This situation invites rethinking of IR's understandings of political order and inter-polity relations. We take up this task by laying out necessary methodological innovations to engage with Aboriginal Australia and then showing how conventional and much recent heterodox IR seek to create forms of 'escape' from lived political relations by asserting the powerful yet problematic social science mechanism of observer's distance. This demonstrates a need to take Aboriginal Australia as a system on its own terms to speak back to IR. We next explain how Aboriginal Australian people produce political order on the Australian continent through a 'relational-ecological' disposition that contrasts with IR's predominant 'survivalist' disposition. The accompanying capacity to manage survivalism through relationalism provides an avenue for engaging with and recasting some of mainstream IR's survivalist assumptions, including by considering an Aboriginal approach to multipolarity, without attempting 'pure escape' through alternative ontologies. We thus argue that while it is necessary to critique and recast dominant IR, doing so requires putting dominant IR and Indigenous understandings into relational exchange.

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the 'houseboy' as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as 'houseboys' in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called 'half‐caste' women who, in acknowledgment of their 'white blood', received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a 'breadwinning' wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.

Over the past two decades, historians of colonial Australia have greatly enriched our understanding of how Aboriginality was racially constructed in nineteenth and early twentieth settler discourses. However, there is arguably much that is yet to be understood about how racialist perceptions of Aboriginal people owed their cultural suasiveness to medico-scientific investigation of the Aboriginal body.This essay attempts to go some way towards answering this question by exploring in contextualised detail how anatomists and anthropologists, in the century or so after 1820, construed the morphology of the 'Aboriginal brain' and its significance in the evolutionary history of humankind. The essay particularly focuses on explicating the goals of these investigators of the 'Aboriginal' brain as they themselves saw them evolving through their uses of evidence and modes of reasoning and argument.Fine grained exploration of how the scientific facticity of the 'Aboriginal' brain was constructed is arguably essential if we are to understand how in obvious, but also in many subtle ways, the outcomes of this research figured in the construal of the biological and psychic dimensions of Aboriginality within settler culture, and on the development of policies for governing Aboriginal people. Moreover, it also offers us a useful source of vicarious knowledge for assessing contemporary scientific interest in the 'Aboriginal' brain.