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The Australian Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) provides for the recognition of rights and interests which arise from the traditional laws and customs of Australian First Nation peoples. Processing applications for a determination of native title can take many years and involves numerous stakeholders, presentation of evidence of ongoing connection with the land and sea within a claim area, negotiations with other parties including from industry and government, as well as negotiations between Indigenous groups. The process can be long, arduous, and often outcomes fail to satisfy the expectations of native title claimants. In this paper we investigate how individuals who either disagree with the premise underlying native title, or who have suffered negative impacts through the course of native title claims, may be either targeted by, or swept up in, Australian sovereign citizen rhetoric. We aim to contextualise presentations of sovereign citizen ideas in native title claim processes by providing an overview of the history of sovereign citizen thought, and examples of its contemporary expression in some Australian online forums. In doing this we aim to provide a broad foundation for future research into the issue. The dialogue in sovereign citizen online communities exposes people to extremism and superconspiracies. This article will provide a theoretical framework and historical context to the Australian sovereign citizen phenomena and describe online amplification of disinformation in Australia that has the potential to cause harm. We illustrate how stakeholders who are drawn to relatively moderate online content (such as opposing native title) may be radicalised through gradual exposure to extremist anti‐government sentiment and hate speech. This article highlights the need for further research into sovereign citizenry in Australia, and strategies for native title practitioners to engage claimants who subscribe to and disseminate sovereign citizen disinformation in native title processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the political economy of Australia's prison industrial complex and its severe impact on Indigenous communities. Taking a historical perspective, the paper moves between a broader analysis of the forced extraction of Indigenous labour by the state and private enterprise and the violence against Indigenous people which accompanies it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern with climate change, and coal's contribution to it, has centred coal in an intensely moralised politics of accusation in Australia. This paper discusses the ordinary ethics through which pro‐coal lobbyists in Australia relate to this moralised landscape and offers an analysis of the everyday and ordinary production of complicity with climate change. It argues that complicity is not just something that insufficiently ethical people engage in, but instead highlights the ways in which the coal industry derives a moral weight for its defenders. This complicity is made and reproduced precisely through the everyday practices of ethical deliberation figured in response to interpersonal moral accusations. These insights are made possible through the author's own positionality and surprising affinities with pro‐coal lobbyists, and thus this paper argues for an anthropology of extractive industry which embraces the interplay of anthropological rapport with complicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pigdogging is a popular pastime in Australia, a form of recreational hunting whereby people collaborate with dogs to chase and catch wild pigs. This paper analyses the hunt as an interspecies event that unfolds through the sensual and sensory entanglements of human and nonhuman, with a particular focus on the perspectives of the hunters. The concept of 'atmosphere' will be employed to frame an ethnographic analysis of two facets of pigdogging. First, by hunting with a dog, humans augment their capacity to identify the presence of pigs through the canine's extraordinary sense of scent. Through this relationship, the world of scent is revealed as having atmospheric properties: an enveloping phenomenon which is known through the dog, yet also escapes the hunter's perceptual apprehension. Second, this paper will illustrate examples of how atmosphere develops through the sensual relations between human and nonhuman bodies during the hunt. An affectively charged interspecies encounter is composed and participated in by the hunter through this recreational practice, and affords the enactment of subjectivities central to an aesthetics of pigdogging. Hunting atmospheres in this paper emerge at the juncture of human and more‐than‐human bodies, perspectives and worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An indelible memory of visitors to Willowra Aboriginal community in Central Australia is the sound of donkeys braying as they roam the village in search of sustenance and are chased by barking dogs. While Warlpiri people view donkeys as an integral part of their sonic landscape, outsiders typically perceive the animals as a noisy, land‐management 'pest' and want them removed. Recently, the arrival of a stranger in a truck towing a donkey trailer provoked concerned discussion. Talk intensified when, for a few days, the donkeys disappeared, and the silence of the donkeys echoed throughout the community. Tracing emergent social relations and mimetic connections that entangle donkeys and people in the Willowra region, this paper explores why donkeys matter to local Warlpiri, sensorially and otherwise. I contrast Warlpiri coexistence with donkeys to the treatment of donkeys by conservationists as feral animal and by capitalists as commodity. Linking the silence of donkeys at Willowra to the global trade in ejiao, a glue made from donkey hides used in Chinese medicine and cosmetics, I engage with Michael Taussig's (2019) 'The cry of the burro [donkey]' to examine differing senses of being and predicaments that the sound of donkeys evoke cross‐culturally. I conclude with a call to listen differently to other‐than‐human beings when considering multispecies assemblages. Attending to the sonic range of donkeys as an expression of their agency, I suggest that we learn from Warlpiri and heed the cries of donkeys and their global silencing if we are to ensure our mutual survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

#MeToo deals in the everyday ambiguous and intersectional, providing a space for discussion of the grey areas of sexual propriety. Since 2017, when the term was mobilised spectacularly in the US entertainment industry, other industries have undertaken an examination of their own practices and norms. In this paper we consider the implications of this political moment for the discipline of anthropology, and specifically the idea of 'the field' in the context of anthropological training in Australia. We argue that fieldwork is tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, fetishised by anthropologists as a transformative domain in which the normative rules of gendered interaction are temporarily suspended in favour of fruitfully engaging informants. Drawing on Bourdieu, we argue that 'the field' (the methodological and symbolic space) is a 'field' (a domain of recognition) that junior anthropologists enter with the expectation that they will suffer as a necessary part of their initiation, placing some PhD students at an enhanced risk of sexual violence. We reflect on the attitude of anthropologists to fieldwork as part of a professional illusio, a belief in the value of 'playing the game' that limits our capacity to modify our methodology to make it safer for neophytes and to reimagine a more just discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the perceptions of Bhutanese refugee women were explored in relation to their changing identity and their behavioural responses in the use of preventive health services following resettlement. Interviews with 30 Bhutanese refugee women in Melbourne revealed resettlement drivers, challenges and dilemmas. There was no option for women other than resettlement, women wanted to escape from bad conditions and hopes for a better future for their children was critical in their thinking. Resettlement introduced new unexpected challenges including cultural discontinuity, changed dependency and a sense of not belonging. Dilemmas were apparent in their experiences including: despondency and contentment, gratitude and regret; and identifying as either Australian or refugee. Motherhood was important to women in this study and was challenged by changed dependency with their children in resettlement. Challenges of cultural discontinuity included the impact of communication difficulties and illiteracy and the absence of social connections with neighbours. A better understanding of how changing identities of women interact should lead to more effective strategies including tailored programs and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between obesity, knowledge and education in a South Australian community setting. In public health circles and public understandings it is commonly assumed that obesity is the result of lack of knowledge about the right things to eat or how to take care of oneself. It is thought that education will fill this knowledge lacunae and most public health campaigns have education as the main platform of information dissemination to enact behavioural change. Based on long‐standing ethnographic work in a community targeted as obesogenic, I explore the limits of mainstream nutrition education, and how constructing people as having deficit knowledge has the unwarranted effect of implying ignorance. Key to the analysis is Ingold's articulation of different modalities of education, one dominant mode which inducts people into rules and regulations of already pre‐formed knowledge, and another which sees education as learning that goes on in the doing of everyday environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we investigate how the values of respect and dignity inform the ways migrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary in Australia locate themselves in relation to local, national and transnational identities. Drawing upon ethnographic insights, we discuss how the concept of culturedness is implicated in these migrant claims for dignified belonging. Determinants of culturedness are informed by influential narratives of 'East versus West', 'Balkan versus Europe', the 'New World (Australia) versus the Old World' (Europe). Implicit within these discourses are attempts to demarcate civilisational distinctions. We argue that dignified belonging for people from these migrant communities in Australia involves negotiating identification with culturedness and positioning themselves on the right side of the civilised/primitive divide. This collaboration draws attention to the significance of ontological security through respect within the shared discourses and experiences of belonging for members of these two migrant groups in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lutheran missionaries from Germany arrived in 1887 to 'care for' and to evangelise to the Kuku-Yalanji people of the Bloomfield River area of the north Queensland rainforests. They left fifteen years later without having converted a single soul. Was this failure the result of inept missionisation? Was Lutheranism at odds with Kuku-Yalanji religious beliefs? This paper argues that the answer lies rather at the core of the Kuku-Yalanji worldview and social universe. Using rich historical sources, this paper demonstrates that Kuku-Yalanji people-who have particular socio-territorial ties to the mission lands-instigated an experiment with the missionaries. Their assumption was that the missionaries held a role that was structurally equivalent to that of ' majamaja' in their own system-key focal individuals with religious knowledge, power and achieved status operating at the node of a social network on a particular area of 'country'. The missionaries failed to live up to this expectation and for this and other reasons, Kuku-Yalanji left and the mission failed with no lasting Christian impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper posits a working or tentative model of medical pluralism, a pattern in which multiple medical sub-systems co-exist, or what I term the Australian dominative medical system. I argue that whereas the Australian medical system with its various medical sub-systems was pluralistic, that is more or less on an equal footing, in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century it became a plural or dominative one in the sense that biomedicine came to clearly dominate other medical sub-systems. This paper also explores the growing interest of biomedicine and the Australian Government in complementary medicine to which Australians have increasingly turned over the course of the past three decades or so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the 'Croker Island case') for several reasons. The applicant's native title was found to be non-exclusive of other interests, and a fight to trade in resources of the sea was rejected. This case was argued in part by relying on historical material regarding Macassan trading arrangements. The profound alterity of Aboriginal relationships among persons and things, as the Croker Island evidence of property and trade relations demonstrates, have been re-constituted in legal discourse as an absence of economic relations. In this paper, we argue that there is no sound basis for the distinction made between commercial and noncommercial native title rights, whether in the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth of Australia), or in recent judicial reasoning. We contend that native title rights and interests constitute a sui generis species of property relations that enable economic rights as conceived in Aboriginal tradition and custom to circulate in the modern market. Aboriginal customary economic relations of and between Aboriginal groupings are markedly distinct from, yet not incommensurable with, the normative conception of economic relations in the Australian market. We argue that a reformulation of the current Australian legal ideas about economic life is necessary for the recognition of Aboriginal economic institutions in native title claims and other economic arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an early discussion of the ways we are approaching Indigenous Studies in Australian Universities. The focus is on how disciplinary and scholarly issues within Indigenous Studies can be interrogated and yet retain the necessary cohesion and solidarity so important to the Indigenous struggle. The paper contrasts Indigenous Studies pursued by Indigenous scholars to other disciplinary perspectives in the academy. Categories such as the Indigenous community and Indigenous knowledge are problematised, not to dissolve them, but to explore productive avenues. I identify one of the problems that Indigenous studies faces as resisting the tendency to perpetuate an enclave within the academy whose purpose is to reflect back an impoverished and codified representation of Indigenous culture to the communities that are its source. On the other hand, there is danger also in the necessary engagement with other disciplines on their own terms. My suggestion is that we see ourselves mapping our understanding of our particular Indigenous experiences upon a terrain intersected by the pathways, both of other Indigenous experiences, and of the non-Indigenous academic disciplines. My intention is to stimulate some thought among Indigenous academics and scholars about the future possibilities of Australian Indigenous Studies as a field of endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the challenges presented to the everyday praxis of maintaining Cuban identity in the Australian context through an examination of the preparation and eating of Cuban food by migrants in Sydney. I argue that the very different demographic configuration of Cubans in Australia and the US is played out through the different experiences of eating. Cuban identity in the US contrasts markedly with the situation in NSW where the small population of Cubans focus on maintaining a Cuban world in their domestic space through the practice of eating Cuban food, rather than in the public domain. The struggle to find and prepare Cuban food in Australia reflects a distance and separation from homeland both spatially and temporally. The paper suggests that the eating habits of this group constitute a significant ethnic marker used by members of the group to differentiate themselves as Cubans in Australia. Additionally, I argue that the existence of a substantial multicultural and ethnic food market in Australia allows Cuban migrants to acquire the products needed for the Cuban cuisine, from shops primarily serving numerically larger ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naming systems play a prominent role in discussions of land tenure by Aboriginal people. Reference to one area of land and its owners is most commonly in terms of name 'X', whereas reference to another area of land and its owners is most commonly made in terms of name 'Y'. Much of the analytical literature examines how these names refer to groups of people. There is considerable dispute as to whether the reference of these names suffices to determine disjoint groupings of owners that can be described by the term 'clan'. This paper proposes that the analysis of linkages between names and areas of land should have priority over the analysis of linkages between names and groups of people. The evidence shows that the attachment of names to areas of land is more stable and consistent than their attachment to groups of people. There are differences in the ways that names attach to the landscape, and these differences are significant--they determine whether or not more than one name from the same system may be attached to an area of land. This paper focuses on two areas of Australia: the northern Kakadu-Oenpelli area and the Timber Creek area (both in the Northern Territory). It shows that naming systems identify disjunctive areas of land as the targets for claims of primary ownership in both areas. These disjunctive areas may reasonably be described with the translation term 'estate'. In the northern Kakadu-Oenpelli area, corresponding to these estates, there are disjunctive groupings of owners, which may be termed 'clans'. However, groupings of owners are not clearly disjunctive in the Timber Creek area, and there is little motivation for using the term 'clan'. This paper proposes that this difference reflects a general pattern in Aboriginal Australia, with naming systems stably and consistently identifying 'estates' across much of the continent. They do not identify 'clans' with equivalent stability and consistency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feral animals are commonly constructed as the scourge of the Australian landscape. The transgressive act of introduced, domestic animals going wild elicits strong emotive responses within the community, often conceived in a kind of Freudian spectre of das unheimliche (the uncanny/ unhomely), as the once familiar becomes uncontrolled, strange and frightening. Meanwhile, exponential global growth in human populations, and the resulting strain on the environment and food security, is necessitating the rethinking of meat consumption. In Australia, while the stigma surrounding feral animals has historically inhibited their consumption, feral meat is regarded by a growing body of advocates as an environmentally favourable alternative to farmed meat, allowing not only the avoidance of animal suffering within the industrial agriculture model, but also benefitting ecosystems through the removal of damage-wreaking interlopers. This paper explores the feral turn and its contemporary manifestations as a growing food movement in Melbourne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifteen years the use of the indigenous Amazonian psychoactive beverage ayahuasca has been reimagined in alternative healing circles of Western countries. This paper explores the practice of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia and examines ways in which acts of vomiting and ecstatic trance-visions involve heightened affective states and moral projects of healing. Aspects of everyday life are purged, rearticulated, and reconstituted in rituals where codes of conduct and discursive exchange encourage practices of personal evaluation and reflexivity that appear to index ideologies of individualism. Through exploring social and discursive prohibitions and forms of sensory organisation, the practice of drinking ayahuasca in Australia is shown to be constituted by ritual conventions that define the individual as autonomous and responsible in relation to ecstatic trance and articulations of wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intimate relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have generally been pursued within the transactional modalities afforded by economy and kinship (e.g. Hamilton 1972; Tonkinson 1990; Redmond 2005). A parallel anthropological literature (e.g. Myers 1979; Venkatesan et al. 2011), however, has critiqued these emphases, and has instead highlighted the need to consider the emotional experiences of individuals. One of the types of individuals considered here is the stranger, a figurative character that Simmel (1950: 403) described as 'no owner of soil'. In this paper I explore the experiences of one of these strangers, 'Andrew', a non-Aboriginal man who was the partner of an Aboriginal woman and living in the remote Aboriginal town of Mornington Island in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. In interpreting Andrew's experiences, I argue for an analytic frame based on understanding how transformative personal encounters including love can bring together and sustain relationships between those of (sometimes) vastly different socio-cultural backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a range of archival and published sources including field notes, photographs and drawings, this paper investigates the social relationships formed between Ngaanyatjarra families and a small group of scientists in the presence of cameras during a 3-week ethnographic research expedition to the Warburton Range in 1935. The impression left by the ethno-historical record is that, despite disparate norms around looking behaviours, a degree of familiarity was quickly established that enabled intimate acts of filming and photography. And yet the inter-subjectivity that facilitated such photography was deliberately obscured when the images produced were subsequently disseminated to outside audiences, in effect reinstating social distance and turning Aboriginal familiars back into strangers. Recent reconsiderations of the figure of 'the stranger' (Simmel 1999; Marotta 2012) and an extensive literature on the relationship between anthropological knowledge and photography (Edwards 1992, 2001) help to unpack what this sociality reveals about belonging, identity and the representative reach of photographic mediums. A series of crayon drawings by the expedition's young Aboriginal guide points to the limits of the social categories assumed for Ngaanyatjarra people by these scientists. In their place is found complex contemporary Aboriginal identities that were simultaneously modern and traditional, embedded in evolving intergenerational social frameworks that have endured until today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many central Australian Aboriginal settlements have recently gained access to mobile phones and the Internet. This paper explores ways in which Aboriginal people engage with this technology outside of institutional settings. Drawing on long-term research among Warlpiri, I reflect on people's responses to earlier communication media such as the two-way radio and radio-telephone and compare them to patterns of use emerging around new technologies. Attending to the social landscape surrounding the uptake of new media and the social networking site 'Divas Chat', I consider how transformations in material structures of communication interact with changing demographics, embodied socio-spatial relations, sorcery beliefs and mobility to reinforce, refigure and/or disrupt patterns of conflict and connectedness that hitherto have structured Warlpiri relational ontology. I suggest that the way people engage with these technologies illuminates and intensifies fault-lines arising from contradictions between older established social orders and changing relations with the state and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the themes and practices of Christian performance at the Western Desert Aboriginal community of Warlungurru in 1988,1 six years after the Pintupi return to their homelands (see ; ; ) and the enthusiastic Christian revival-nightly Gospel singing, a ban on gambling-experienced in the first years of their return. My concern is with how a distinctively Lutheran focus in Pintupi Christianity (in opposition to competing Pentecostal orientations in Central Australia at that time) was grasped by some Pintupi as a structure organising relations between Indigenous people and others in the world, and how specialised knowledge constituted positions of prestige and authority. Thus, I explore certain convergences between prior Indigenous formulations of personhood and relatedness and the way in which Lutheran Christianity was articulated during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O 'schoolies cruise' at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped-up chorus of 'Shi-ire!' and 'White Pride!' rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the 'moral panic' idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses large-scale genealogical work at thee projects in Papua New Guinea, West Papua and Australia and considers three questions: in what respects is genealogy intellectual property (IP) and, if so, who owns it; what were the regimes of petitions that permitted the collection of genealogical knowledge in each of the three cases; and what duty of care do collector/curators of genealogical knowledge have in respect of preservation and safeguarding against improper use? It is argued that a new form of "emergent" knowledge arises in which intellectual property rights (IPR) are unclear. What is more certain is that anthropologists owe a 'cultural heritage duty of care' towards genealogical information The key criterion is that anthropologists must he in a position, and allowed by those who employ them, to guarantee 'unbroken eyesight' of genealogical materials regardless of what media they are on or how they are stored [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how an idea of the Australian Aborigine impacted upon the development of racial thinking throughout the nineteenth century. We distinguish three phases of this development. Against the background of what was considered to be a distinctly human capacity to rise above nature, our central argument however is that the extreme and irremediable savagery attributed to the Aborigine led to the mid-nineteenth shift to a polygenist, or an innatist, idea of race. The first part of our discussion, covering the early 1800s, elicits a specifically humanist puzzlement at the unimproved condition of the Aborigines. But, as we will show in the central part of our discussion, it was not only the Aborigines' inclination but their capacity for 'improvement' that came to be doubted. Challenging the very basis upon which 'the human' had been defined, and the unity of humankind assumed, the Aborigine could not be accommodated within a prevailing conception of racial difference as a mere variety of the human. The elaboration of polygenism may therefore be understood arising out of this humanist incomprehension: as an attempt to account for the ontologically inexplicable difference of the Australian Aborigine. In the final part of our discussion, we trace the legacy of the Aborigine's place within polygenism through the evolutionary thought of the late nineteenth century. Despite an explicit return to monogenism, here the Aborigine is invoked to support the claim that race constitutes a more or less parmanent difference and, for certain races, a more or less permanent deficiency. And as, in these terms, the anomalous Aborigine became an anachronism, so Australia's indigenous peoples came to embody the most devastating conclusion of evolutionary thought: that in the human struggle for existence certain races were destined not even to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public ('non-restricted') ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946-1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter-indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter-Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo-colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an ethnographic journey into Italian-Australian cultural production through an examination of the Italian term for both the flavour and taste of herbs, aroma. Here, I explore the ways in which staple foods and their commensalities engender staple cultural production without necessarily overdetermining the culture produced. Taking the material indeterminacy of culture as a theoretical starting point, I argue that this is the reliable beauty of aroma as well as is its capacity to capture the realities of culture as lived experience. When culture is approached from this direction, stature is returned to ethnographic subjects as people living lives rather than as automatons of cultural form. From this vantage, a theoretical preoccupation with order and structure may be seen to hinder rather than enhance an apprehension of ethnographic fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists increasingly express links between individuals or collectivities through the discursively convenient prefix '-inter'; inter-personal, inter-subjective, inter-cultural, inter-textual. However, attempts to describe the psychodynamics that effect the linkings that are integral to human social experience have not held pace. I want to suggest that a regard for the ontogenetic primary forms of encounter--looking, eating, playing--can substantiate the analysis of being a self among other selves within and across the boundaries of social worlds. Engaging a phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspective, this paper examines how We-relationships have been variously structured by Pitjantjatjara Aborigines in encountering others at home and in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'women's business' on Hindmarsh Island has had spectacular success although vital evidence had been kept secret 'in a sealed envelope'. This paper, drawing primarily on the author's own encounter with the native title claims procedure, discusses various formative processes involved in the contemporary construction of Aboriginal indigeneity in which religious belief is heavily valorised. Subjected to a process of rationalisation for a long time, religious traditions are now being used as a strategic resource in native title claims. In the endeavour to make best possible use of the jurisprudential opportunity offered, the maintenance of secrecy and cloaking of information emerges as an important strategy. Secrecy clearly is an integral part of traditional Aboriginal culture. However, cloaking in fact may not only privilege esoteric contents, but merge with attempts of deliberate deception. Yet, in itself this too might be considered an Aboriginal cultural tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption by Australian couples of children from 'overseas' involves elaborate processes of bureaucratic assessment, approval and 'parent education'. This paper explores adults' notions of 'child'(ren) from 'overseas', which help shape and constitute such social processes, not only with couples seeking to adopt, but also with those cultural brokers who assess, regulate and 'educate' couples pursuing adoption, such as social workers and psychologists. The ways in which the adoptive 'child' is imagined and anticipated by counsellors and would-be parents alike are explored through ethnographic data from South Australia. However, the proclivities of prospective adoptive parents to imagine their child-to-be are attenuated by certain social knowledge in relation to countries of origin. This leads to an exploration of ambiguities and tensions between the intercountry adoptive child as a tabula rasa and as a culturally and historically constituted person. The significance of ambiguities and contradictions for the child's agency and identities is highlighted, within the context of certain social policies around adoption. The chronological age of the child at the time of 'allocation' to its adoptive parents is considered as constituting a cultural fulcrum, upon which the identity and situational significance of the 'origins' of the child are deemed to subsequently turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of surfing has often been at odds with the mores of wider society, to the point where surfers have been described in the media as rotten, long-haired, unwashed drug addicts, or as jobless junkies. However, in recent years there has been an increase in the popularity of surfing and an increase in the consumption of surfing related commodities. This increase in popularity is largely due to the marketing practices of the business interests that are involved in surfing, which has appropriated its images and sold them to a rapidly expanding and lucrative market. This paper will outline how the commodification of surfing's visual style, and the meanings that are symbolised by this development, have had a three-fold effect on the sport. First, surfing has been shifted away from the beach into quite different contexts; second, surfing as understood by the wider society has been altered and; third, the commodifying practices of business interests have transferred the symbolic ownership of the sport from surfers to surfing capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on research with Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District of Australia, this paper explores time in patterns of motion and pause. Taking Cath Ellis's insight that some Aboriginal musicians possess a faculty of 'perfect time', and that the meshing of rhythms and other patterns in music has the effect of altering perceptions and understandings of time, I explore rhythmic patterns in four domains--nomadology, ecology, dance and cosmology. I suggest that the cosmogonic and temporal effects of rhythm in motion are capable of becoming performative events because they link the rhythms of ecological, social and ritual domains. Such events implicate the ephemeral motion and temporality of the world in a continuing flow of becoming, and implicate the continuity of flow in the actions of the ephemeral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at recent attention given to feral cats in Australia, particularly focusing on their symbolic status in eco-nationalist discourses. Australian eco-nationalism is a specific blend of environmentalist and patriotic sentiments which, in an exaggerated way, positions the feral cat as a rapacious European invader predating on native wild life. This vilification of the cat can be related to much earlier forms of (mainly European) symbolism associating the creature with femininity and evil, which I illustrate by looking at the manner in which the feral cat is opposed to the masculinised Australian wild dog--the dingo. I argue that the recent surfacing of this totemic opposition between 'the howl and the pussycat' is related to an eco-nationalist sense of place which simultaneously recognises and denies that the human colonisation of Australia was (and is) a form of feral invasion. It seems that the merciless human rearrangement of the whole earth is to have no green ending. (Les Murray 1996, excerpt from the poem 'On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals') [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]