Mickey Dewar made a profound contribution to the history of the Northern Territory, which she performed across many genres. She produced high‑quality, memorable and multi-sensory histories, including the Cyclone Tracy exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and the reinterpretation of Fannie Bay Gaol. Informed by a great love of books, her passion for history was infectious. As well as offering three original chapters that appraise her work, this edited volume republishes her first book, In Search of the Never-Never. In Dewar's comprehensive and incisive appraisal of the literature of the Northern Territory, she provides brilliant, often amusing insights into the ever-changing representations of a region that has featured so large in the Australian popular imagination.
"Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and colonizers in times of nation formation.The romantic relationships of well-known and ordinary interracial couples provide the backdrop against which McGrath discloses the "marital middle ground" that emerged as a primary threat to European colonial and racial supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds from the Age of Revolution to the Progressive Era. These relationships include the controversial courtship between white, Connecticut-born Harriett Gold and southern Cherokee Elias Boudinot; the Australian missionary Ernest Gribble and his efforts to socially segregate the settler and aboriginal population, only to be overcome by his romantic impulses for an aboriginal woman, Jeannie; the irony of Cherokee leader John Ross's marriage to a white woman, Mary Brian Stapler, despite his opposition to interracial marriages in the Cherokee Nation; and the efforts among ordinary people in the imperial borderlands of both the United States and Australia to circumvent laws barring interracial love, sex, and marriage.Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. A tour de force of settler colonial history, McGrath's study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged"--
"Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and colonizers in times of nation formation. The romantic relationships of well-known and ordinary interracial couples provide the backdrop against which McGrath discloses the "marital middle ground" that emerged as a primary threat to European colonial and racial supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds from the Age of Revolution to the Progressive Era. These relationships include the controversial courtship between white, Connecticut-born Harriett Gold and southern Cherokee Elias Boudinot; the Australian missionary Ernest Gribble and his efforts to socially segregate the settler and aboriginal population, only to be overcome by his romantic impulses for an aboriginal woman, Jeannie; the irony of Cherokee leader John Ross's marriage to a white woman, Mary Brian Stapler, despite his opposition to interracial marriages in the Cherokee Nation; and the efforts among ordinary people in the imperial borderlands of both the United States and Australia to circumvent laws barring interracial love, sex, and marriage. Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. A tour de force of settler colonial history, McGrath's study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged"--
The Greater Blue Mountains holds a special place in the making of the Australian nation. It is a location of demonstrable and outstanding national historical significance. With its iconic profile and famous heritage, it has long been recognised as an area that was foundational to the building of the Australian nation. The Greater Blue Mountains region is a place of outstanding Australian national heritage value and a unique repository that spans early convict and pastoral history, economic and technological growth, tourism, wilderness and political movements, science, culture and creativity. The region has played an outstanding role in the conceptualization of Australia's national history and its national legends. As the location of prime historical events in Australia's early European history, it reflects the early convict settlement and early nationalist sentiments. Its pivotal economic history is widely acknowledged and of enduring significance. Australia's most influential national historians have identified the European history of the Blue Mountains as a region where the nation's key historical 'turning points' have taken place. The Blue Mountains Crossing of 1813 has become a mainstay of school history textbooks over Australia's first century of federated nationhood. Australia's best-known poets, novelists, artists and others have popularised its heritage. Indicating its significance in Australian history, Australia's most prominent and highly regarded historians have detailed its historic significance, including Australia's premier Commonwealth historian, W.K. Hancock (1930), followed for example, by Manning Clark (1993), Russell Ward (1958), John Hirst (2000), and Martin Thomas (2004). This paper discusses the historical significance of the Greater Blue Mountains following a number of historical themes from 1788, through the colonial and modern periods. The Greater Blue Mountains meets several, and possibly all, of the assessment criteria for National Heritage and historical values, and illustrates their ...
As we have seen, Aboriginal people were omitted from the concept of the new Australian nation. Denied citizenship until 1948 and excluded from the census and voting for federal elections until 1968, the commonwealth could not legislate on their behalf. Not all Aborigines had come within the power of the colonisers, though; in remote regions, their land and communities were still their own and frontier warfare was not yet over. Class, sex, race and ethnicity were branded as divisive in the new nation, but colonialism located Australia's Indigenous people not only in a special position of oppression but also one of danger to the national interest. To acknowledge the separate interests or d1fferent history of the Aboriginal people would reveal the extent to which Australia's white settlement was premised on colonial takeover and domination.
'Black Velvet' was the term used to describe Aboriginal women with whom white men had sexual intercourse. The expression originated as nineteenth-century English military slang, and it is also the name of an Irish drink consisting of a mixture of stout and champagne or cider. Henry Lawson used it in the Australian context in 'Ballad of rouseabout', published 1899. Territorian Bill Harney, writer and ex-Aboriginal welfare officer elucidated: 'The surface of the skin was smooth, a feature that gave us bushies the saying of 'Black Velvet'. Undoubtedly there are numerous bushmen's explanations for the etymology of this evocative expression.
Wik is generally associated with the pastoral industry, and with that important High Court case which ruled that native title still existed on pastoral leases in Australia. The Wik are a group of indigenous Australians who live in North Queensland, and who were moved off their land at Arukun to make way for mining development under Joh Bjelke-Petersen's regime. In those days they looked like a bunch of innocents being pushed around by big business. Now things have changed. Their rights to mining royalties may not be as clear-cut as under the Northern Territory Land Rights Act, but the Cape York Land Council and other key negotiating groups have been astutely stitching together some deals which see mining companies now working closely with Aborigines, and governments resisting the pace of negotiation and change.
This article examines the history of colonial and national policies towards indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is specifically concerned with the ways in which such legislation affected Aboriginal women. In attempting to provide a comparative assessment of the "statutory subjugation" of Aboriginal women, the article examines the law's definition of identity and band membership; enfranchisement and assimilation; personal autonomy (marriage, divorce, sexuality, motherhood); private and personal property; and political reorganization. It concludes that gender and race were key determinants of government policy in both countries, and that under the Canadian Indian Act and Australian Aboriginal Acts, women, in particular, suffered a great decline in status and severe limitations of autonomy. But the failure of state policies to bring about the complete degradation of Aboriginal women in particular, and Aboriginal peoples in general, suggests that there were forces operating to "destabilize . hegemonic colonial control." Competing colonial values, collective resistance of Aboriginal societies, and the individual contestations of both colonizer and colonized, in the end, undermined imperial objectives.
How often have you heard a well-meaning person asking 'What is the answer to the "Aboriginal problem"?' Aboriginal Australian academics once responded by attesting that whites were the problem, and that Aborigines must be given back their land. Today those same people are involved in intense debates about just what to do about the ongoing post-Mabo tragedy in remote Australia. So yes, this is a now-acknowledged, but a confusing, multi-facetted problem. Violence and early death are endemic. People are suffering. Too many deaths of loved ones – of very young people, of sharp-witted people full of life, humour and fun, and of talented, accomplished leaders in their prime.
When Australia became a nation in 1901, its newly written constitution excluded all Aborigines, male and female, from citizenship. The Australian state was premised upon particular understandings of the bodies within it, based upon assumptions about race, gender and culture. Black people stood outside the white shell of Australia's emergent body politic. Sex, or their different physical constitutions, had long precluded white women from democratic rights within the colonies, though they all eventually rec;eived voting rights with the coming of federation. For Aborigines, 'race', notably skin pigment, set them apart from what is perceived as Australia's national physique. In their traditional cosmology, northern Australian Aborigines also privilege the importance of a metonymic 'skin'. As well as gender, 'skin' or kinship classification is central to identity and social organisation. It determines the individual's place in their socio-political system, relegating responsibilities and rights in relation to everyone else, including areas of work, food and marriage.1 In white Australian rhetoric of the early twentieth century, the emphasis on AboriginaJ 'blood' implied the distinction was not only superficial but one of 'essence'.
In 1901, the year of Australian federation, the newly constituted State of Queensland restricted marriage between Indigenous women and non-Indigenous men. These amendments to the Aboriginal Protection Act legislation of 1897 criminalized the informal marital arrangements that criss-crossed Queensland's cultural and colonizing boundaries. The stated aims of the policy were to "protect" Indigenous women from sexual exploitation and to prevent the birth of "half-castes" or mixed descent children. Yet, as established or de facto marital relationships were considered a greater affront to the colonial/national project than casual sex, police only arrested those who "cohabited" with and openly acknowledged their Indigenous partners
This volume assesses the often-conflicting roles and contributions of the Roths as government servants and anthropologists. Most of the volume deals with Walter E. Roth, who developed foundational studies of both the Australian Aborigines--considered to be among the first systematic ethnographies anywhere--and South American tribes while serving as Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland and later medical officer, magistrate, museum curator and indigenous relations officer in British Guyana. Henry Ling Roth's contributions to the anthropology of Tasmania, Benin, Sarawak, and New Zealand are also enumerated, as are the publications and administrative activities of the succeeding generation of Roths.
Voracious white ants, floods, fires, damp, decades of government failu res, neglect and other paper-destroying hazards destroyed much of the north's colonizing record. Its early ports, Fort Dundas, Fort Wellington and Fort Essington, were abandoned, then its administrative centre, the first Palmerston at Escape Cliffs, was deserted. The cyclones of 1897 and 1937 leveled the second Palmerston (renamed Darwin in I 911) while dramatic attacks during 1942 and 1943 by Japanese bombers during World War Two, again flattened much of the city. Another kind of cataclysmcolonialism- causcd the partial destruction oflndigenous peoples and their perspectives of history.
This article examines the history of colonial and national policies towards indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is specifically concerned with the ways in which such legislation affected Aboriginal women. In attempting to provide a comparative assessment of the "statutory subjugation" of Aboriginal women, the article examines the law's definition of identity and band membership; enfranchisement and assimilation; personal autonomy (marriage, divorce, sexuality, motherhood); private and personal property; and political reorganization. It concludes that gender and race were key determinants of government policy in both countries, and that under the Canadian Indian Act and Australian Aboriginal Acts, women, in particular, suffered a great decline in status and severe limitations of autonomy. But the failure of state policies to bring about the complete degradation of Aboriginal women in particular, and Aboriginal peoples in general, suggests that there were forces operating to "destabilize . hegemonic colonial control." Competing colonial values, collective resistance of Aboriginal societies, and the individual contestations of both colonizer and colonized, in the end, undermined imperial objectives.
