Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 35

Description

In this volume, Grace Karskens extends her cross-cultural research on early colonial New South Wales by focusing on the uses of European clothing by Aboriginal men. Leah Lui-Chivizhe describes the participation of Torres Strait Islander men in railway construction work in Western Australia. Noah Riseman focuses on the life of one man to explore the experience of institutionalisation as a member of the Stolen Generations and later as a member of the Australian armed forces. Both these articles reflect on the nature of personal and collective remembrance, the ethics of using oral testimony in writing Indigenous history, and the relationship between oral and archival evidence. Ian D. Clark’s article answers Michael Connor’s refutation of the ‘Convincing Ground’ massacre and gives his own interpretations and conclusions regarding the evidence.

Christine Choo and Peta Stephenson, leaders of research into Aboriginal–Asian relations, have edited a special section on this topic, 30 years after James Urry’s Aboriginal History 1981 volume 5 on the same theme. They note in their introduction that the four papers together ‘retrieve pre-colonial and colonial relationships that place white settler narratives of Australia’s social development in a wider perspective. In the process, they challenge the ideological foreclosures and sometimes methodological timidity of mainstream nationalist histories’. Campbell Macknight published a piece in the 1981 volume on his research into contact between Macassans and Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land; in this volume, he reflects on the development of his own scholarship and on research in this area. Anna Shnukal did not contribute a piece to the 1981 volume, but in 1985 (Volume 9) she published an article on Torres Strait Islander creole. Her contribution this time focuses on Filipinos in the outer Torres Strait islands and the families they established with Indigenous women. Marriage is also the theme in Julia Martínez’s article, exploring marriages between Indonesian men and Indigenous Australian women. Victoria Haskins documents one Chinese family’s efforts to be allowed to employ Aboriginal workers in the early twentieth century.

Aboriginal History Inc. is a publishing organisation based in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra.

For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.