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This paper examines the strategies that speakers employ in response to children's crying in the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye, in northern Australia. Drawing on spontaneous interactions amongst Murrinhpatha speaking families, we analyse instances of crying by children aged 0;6 to 8;11 years, and the ways in which they are responded to. Results indicate that adult Murrinhpatha speakers manage children's distress through a variety of verbal and non-verbal strategies, and multimodal combinations thereof. The selection of strategies directly relates to the developmental stage of the crier. Adult caregivers respond differently to the crying of infants, of children who can walk unaided but are producing little if any language, of children who can talk intelligibly, and children more advanced again who have a degree of social independence. In the particular strategies that caregivers apply, they guide children towards a developmentally appropriate self-sufficiency. Caregivers encourage autonomy in ways that reflect a child's current abilities, be it physical, linguistic, emotional, or social. By exploring responses to crying in an under-researched cultural and linguistic context, this paper offers a unique perspective on the pragmatics of managing distress and what this reveals about local constructions of personhood within the context of carer-child interaction. • Analysis examines responses to children's crying in a remote Australian Aboriginal community. • Methods utilize multimodal analysis of spontaneous crying events in early childhood. • Findings show how caregiver responses are situated in relation to local expectations of children across developmental stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the strategies that speakers employ in response to children's crying in the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye, in northern Australia. Drawing on spontaneous interactions amongst Murrinhpatha speaking families, we analyse instances of crying by children aged 0;6 to 8;11 years, and the ways in which they are responded to. Results indicate that adult Murrinhpatha speakers manage children's distress through a variety of verbal and non-verbal strategies, and multimodal combinations thereof. The selection of strategies directly relates to the developmental stage of the crier. Adult caregivers respond differently to the crying of infants, of children who can walk unaided but are producing little if any language, of children who can talk intelligibly, and children more advanced again who have a degree of social independence. In the particular strategies that caregivers apply, they guide children towards a developmentally appropriate self-sufficiency. Caregivers encourage autonomy in ways that reflect a child's current abilities, be it physical, linguistic, emotional, or social. By exploring responses to crying in an under-researched cultural and linguistic context, this paper offers a unique perspective on the pragmatics of managing distress and what this reveals about local constructions of personhood within the context of carer-child interaction. • Analysis examines responses to children's crying in a remote Australian Aboriginal community. • Methods utilize multimodal analysis of spontaneous crying events in early childhood. • Findings show how caregiver responses are situated in relation to local expectations of children across developmental stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bass Strait divides mainland Australia from Tasmania (Fig. 1). During much of the Pleistocene, lowered sea levels meant there was a land bridge joining these land masses. It is now generally accepted that the formation of the Strait by post-glacial sea rise effectively separated the human populations of Tasmania from those of mainland Australia, leading to one of the most extreme cases of isolation known on the global scale. The Tasmanian Aborigines were separated for some 12,000 years from their nearest neighbours in Southeast Australia. None of the larger islands of Bass Strait appears to have been occupied at the time of European contact, and the archaeological record sees this lack of occupation stretching back centuries, and millennia in some cases. Some 35 years ago, Rhys Jones (1977) presented a complex model relating to the past human occupation of the Bass Strait Islands. Using biogeographical concepts and principles he concluded that there were critical points of size and distance that led to the abandonment of these islands, with the exception of the Hunter group in northwest Tasmania. Archaeological research carried out since 1977 does not militate against the broad strokes of this model – there is still no evidence for more recent contact between Australia and Tasmania, or for any recent occupation of most of the abandoned islands. There is however scope for a more nuanced consideration of their occupation and abandonment, in the light of more recent research which this paper will attempt. In general, archaeologists have not considered in this framework the latest phase of Aboriginal occupation in the Bass Strait Islands; there has been an ongoing Aboriginal population since the early 19th century, continuing many of the traditions of Tasmanian Aboriginal society. This paper attempts a continuous narrative from archaeology and history of the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Bass Strait Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large mounded deposits of shell are prominent archaeological features across much of the north Australian tropical coast. Many of the shell mounds are composed almost entirely of the bivalve Anadara granosa (Linnaeus 1758), a food source for Aboriginal people in the past. A relatively long history of inquiry into the nature and significance of the shell mounds has focussed primarily on analysing the shell component as clues to Australian Aboriginal coastal economies in the past. This paper presents results of new analyses on the non-shell sediments, examining the physical and chemical signatures of depositional and post-depositional processes within shell mounds near Weipa in far north Queensland, Australia, with a view to obtaining insights into how they formed and for what purposes, and how their morphology, structure and content may have changed since they ceased accumulating. We also consider how such changes might relate to past and present environmental conditions. Physical and chemical analyses indicate that the primary purpose of mound building was most likely to discard the large volumes of shell resulting from A. granosa harvesting and consumption. Post-depositional diagenetic alteration has strongly influenced the present day composition and form of the shell mounds, in particular the accession of carbon and silica to the mounds by environmental burning aided by strong leaching under the seasonal high rainfall conditions. As such the mound chemistry is more likely to reflect modern environmental conditions rather than provide an archive of, or an opening to, the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Diabetes is a major health problem for Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Point-of-care testing for haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) has been the cornerstone of a long-standing program (QAAMS) to manage glycaemic control in Indigenous people with diabetes and recently, to diagnose diabetes. Methods The QAAMS quality management framework includes monthly testing of quality control (QC) and external quality assurance (EQA) samples. Key performance indicators of quality include imprecision (coefficient of variation [CV%]) and percentage acceptable results. This paper reports on the past 15 years of quality testing in QAAMS and examines the performance of HbA1c POC testing at the 6.5% cut-off recommended for diagnosis. Results The total number of HbA1c EQA results submitted from 2002 to 2016 was 29,093. The median imprecision for EQA testing by QAAMS device operators averaged 2.81% (SD 0.50; range 2.2 to 3.9%) from 2002 to 2016 and 2.44% (SD 0.22; range 2.2 to 2.9%) from 2009 to 2016. No significant difference was observed between the median imprecision achieved in QAAMS and by Australasian laboratories from 2002 to 2016 (p = 0.05; two-tailed paired t -test) and from 2009 to 2016 (p = 0.17; two-tailed paired t -test). For QC testing from 2009 to 2016, imprecision averaged 2.5% and 3.0% for the two levels of QC tested. Percentage acceptable results averaged 90% for QA testing from 2002 to 2016 and 96% for QC testing from 2009 to 2016. The DCA Vantage was able to measure a patient and an EQA sample with an HbA1c value close to 6.5% both accurately and precisely. Conclusion HbA1c POC testing in QAAMS has remained analytically sound, matched the quality achieved by Australasian laboratories and met profession-derived analytical goals for 15 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archival research into episodes of frontier violence in the Kimberley region of Western Australia indicate that the bodies of Aboriginal victims of massacres were frequently incinerated following the event. This paper presents the results of a scientific investigation of a reported massacre at Sturt Creek where burnt bone fragments were identified in two adjacent sites and documents the archaeological signatures associated with the sites. The methodology used to undertake the project brought together three systems of knowledge: the oral testimonies of the descent group originating from a sole adult survivor of the massacre; archival, historical and scientific research. An archaeological survey defined the two distinct sites containing hundreds of fragile bone fragments; a third site was found to be highly disturbed. Scientific investigations included macroscopic and microscopic examination of selected bone fragments by an anatomical pathologist and a zooarchaeologist and X-ray diffraction analysis of sixteen bone fragments. The anatomical pathologist and zooarchaeologist undertook macroscopic and microscopic examinations of selected bone samples to identify morphological evidence for human origin. It was concluded that three bone fragments examined may have been human, and two of the fragments may have been from the vault of a skull. It was concluded that the likelihood of them being human would be strengthened if it was found that the three samples had been subjected to high temperatures. X-ray diffraction analysis of 16 bone fragments provided this evidence. All fragments showed sharp hydroxylapatite peaks (crystallite sizes 9882nm and 597nm respectively) and all had been subjected to extreme temperatures of either 600°C for more than 80h, 650°C for more than 20h, 700°C for more than 4h or 800°C for more than 1h. XRD analyses were also done on bone samples collected from three cooking hearths at three different archaeological sites. It was found that two of the three samples had been exposed to substantially lower temperatures for a short time period. It was concluded that there was strong pathological and archaeological evidence that the bone fragments were human in origin, but that the evidence was not conclusive. This research also identified archaeological signatures for the identification of massacre sites in similar Australian environments and circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper reveals how intercultural communication can be examined from the perspective of cultural conceptualisations using the analytical tools of ‘cultural schemas’ and ‘cultural categories’. It focuses on an analysis of miscommunication between speakers of Aboriginal English and Australian English, miscommunication which has often disadvantaged Aboriginal speakers in educational, legal and other settings. This miscommunication largely occurs due to a discrepancy in the ways in which speakers of the two dialects conceptualise experience. Many Aboriginal people operate on the basis of conceptualisations that embody their spiritual worldview. It is observed that even everyday English words such as ‘sing’, ‘smoke’, and ‘medicine’ may be used by Aboriginal people to instantiate their spiritual schemas and categories. This paper provides examples of such usage through the analysis of excerpts from oral narratives produced by several Aboriginal speakers. The analyses presented in this paper clearly show the strength of the approach of cultural conceptualisations in studies of intercultural communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Foster parents are often subjected to trauma-related behaviours that may impact upon their own wellbeing. • Foster parents perceive trauma-related behaviours as unpredictable and omnipresent. • Foster parents living with the trauma of a foster child can feel socially isolated. • Specific training and support opportunities are necessary to support foster parents so as to address or prevent vicarious trauma. In Australia, significant numbers of children in out-of-home care live in foster care placements, with many such placements being long-term. Despite the potential healing that may occur in the context of foster care, many foster children experience high levels of poor mental health, and may enact trauma-related behaviours that can significantly impact upon the foster placement. Yet to date, the topic of foster parents witnessing and living with the trauma experienced by their foster children has received relatively little empirical attention. This paper reports on a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 85 Australian foster parents providing long-term care to non-indigenous children, focusing specifically on accounts of vicarious trauma. Four themes were developed: (1) Trauma-related behaviours are unpredictable and require constant attention, (2) Trauma histories are always present and make it hard to connect, (3) Caring for children with a trauma history can be socially isolating, and (4) Lack of agency support to understand child's trauma. The paper concludes by exploring implications of the findings for the support, training, and care of foster parents so as to ensure that the potential for vicarious trauma is recognized and addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kangaroo Island has long been a source of creation mythology for Indigenous Australians. Over the last century, it has also been a source of creation mythology for Australian archaeology. The theme of the archaeological mythology has been the notion, based on culture-historical interpretations of stone artefact typologies, that the Island was occupied by people belonging to successive large-tool (“Kartan”) and small-tool “Cultures”. A fundamental tenet of the “Kartan Mystery” has been the notion that the Island was abandoned for several thousand years prior to the European colonisation of South Australia, and following the attainment of modern sea-levels, the Indigenous people of southern Australia lacked either the watercraft or the will to continue to inhabit Kangaroo Island and other offshore islands along the southern coastline. From at least as far east as Tasmania to as far west as Rottnest Island off Fremantle (Western Australia), there are islands which have a prehistoric archaeological record and/or an ethnographic status as uninhabited “Islands of the Dead” for adjacent, mainland or Tasmanian Aboriginal societies. This paper explores these notions and refers to evidence that Aboriginal Australians of the southern Australian coastal regions both used watercraft and visited offshore islands such as Kangaroo Island throughout the pre-colonial Holocene period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Indigenous Australians experience significant social risk, vulnerability and disadvantage. Nowhere is this more starkly demonstrated than in the levels of contact that Indigenous Australians have with the criminal justice system, particularly the police. Utilizing a linked dataset of extant criminal justice, human and health service administrative data in New South Wales (NSW) Australia, this paper explores patterns of police contact and custody for a cohort of Indigenous males with complex needs. Four significant factors are identified that alone or in combination appear to impact on the frequency with which these men experience police contact and custody, including young age at first police contact, experiencing out of home care as a child, alcohol misuse, and limited locational mobility. Whilst it might be expected that the presence of mental ill-health and/or cognitive disability would be a key predictor of the frequency and intensity of police contact and custody, the findings suggest rather that the presence of multiple disadvantages beginning in the early years and compounding throughout individuals' lives, in which mental illness may or may not be a factor, is more significant than the presence of any one diagnosis in precipitating police contact and custody for this group. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Social capital has been linked to physical and mental health. While definitions of social capital vary, all include networks of social relationships and refer to the subsequent benefits and disadvantages accrued to members. Research on social capital for Aboriginal Australians has mainly focused on discrete rural and remote Aboriginal contexts with less known about the features and health and other benefits of social capital in urban settings. This paper presents findings from in-depth interviews with 153 Aboriginal people living in urban areas on their experiences of social capital. Of particular interest was how engagement in bonding and bridging networks influenced health and wellbeing. Employing Bourdieu's relational theory of capital where resources are unequally distributed and reproduced in society we found that patterns of social capital are strongly associated with economic, social and cultural position which in turn reflects the historical experiences of dispossession and disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal Australians. Social capital was also found to both reinforce and influence Aboriginal cultural identity, and had both positive and negative impacts on health and wellbeing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: By the time Europeans arrived on Australian shores several hundred years ago, the lifestyle of Aboriginal populations across the continent varied from region to region: they spoke many different languages, their social organization differed from one region to another, they partook of varied cultural practices, and they produced material culture which took diverse forms in different places. Taking rock art as an example of this diversity, this paper will describe the chronology and form of late-Holocene rock art from five major painted art provinces and discuss the arguments researchers have proposed for the relatively recent emergence of new regional art styles. Implicated are demographic change, environmental change including rising sea levels, increased social complexity, the introduction of a totemic belief system, territorial change, or the migration of people from outside Australia. Two detailed rock art studies, one from northwest Queensland and one from central Australia will be presented to provide insight into why new art styles were produced. Explanations for the emergence of new distinct rock art styles that differed from previous assemblages within these areas are predicated on an understanding of stylistic behaviour and the circumstances under which groups are likely to feel the need to differentiate themselves from their neighbours. Findings indicate that, rather than a single cause, multiple factors are likely to have played a role in the emergence of new regionally distinct rock art styles. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: While population mobility is a fundamental component of the lived experience of many Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, the ways in which educators and education systems respond (or fail to respond) to mobility demonstrates that there is very little understanding of this social and cultural phenomena. At the local school level, student mobility has significant impacts upon the work of teachers and administrators, as well as upon the social and academic outcomes of both mobile and non-mobile students. It is consequently widely constructed as an ‘Indigenous problem’ that must be overcome by educators. Simultaneously, existing education administrative and performance data are collected and used in ways that erase and/or oversimplify the relationship of mobility to schooling. This paper critically examines the role of administrative and performance data in reinforcing assumptions about student (immobility), and the potential of such data to provide a more accurate and complete framework for engaging with highly mobile Indigenous students. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Despite claims of a negative impact on Indigenous school attendance due to mobility no attempt has been made to estimate the number of school-age Indigenous children away from a home base at any one time. This paper uses census data to derive such estimates for the first time. It finds that Indigenous children are mostly sedentary within their school catchment area. This suggests that factors other than chronic mobility might be more prominent in accounting for observed outcomes. Could it be that mobility is more a consequence, rather than a cause, of low school attendance? To consider this, data are drawn from a case study of school attendance in the predominantly Aboriginal town of Wadeye in Australia''s Northern Territory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

There is a current debate about development of the river and wetland systems of tropical Australia. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal residents of tropical river catchment areas have complex values for these systems which are difficult for decision-makers to accommodate. Aboriginal Australians are a large and growing proportion of the population and are also significant landowners, yet there is little information about the impacts of potential development scenarios on the welfare of Aboriginal Australians that can be used in benefit–cost analyses. This paper reports the application of a choice experiment to assess the potential impact of development/management strategies for three tropical rivers in Australia, and explores the differences between the preferences of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians living in the catchment areas. Most respondents preferred healthy river systems that are managed under conservation schemes even if this comes at a private cost. The willingness-to-pay of Aboriginal Australians was significantly higher than that of non-Aboriginal Australians for some river attributes, particularly those related to cultural values. Aboriginal respondents were also indifferent towards the extraction of water for irrigated agriculture while non-Aboriginal respondents preferred moderate rather than large or small scale use. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper focuses on optional ergative marking in the Papuan language Ku Waru and the Australian Aboriginal language Bunuba, especially in constructions with verbs of speaking. It addresses two interrelated issues: (i) What semantic and pragmatic factors are associated with the difference between ergative and non-ergative subject marking in languages where this is not strictly determined by whether the verb is grammatically transitive or intransitive; (ii) How are we to understand the grammatical relationship between verbs of speaking and the material they frame? In both languages that material behaves in some respects like a grammatical object. These locutionary objects differ among themselves in the extent to which they stand out as distinct speech events in relation to the framing one, and those differences are correlated with the presence or absence of ergative marking on the subject of the framing verb. I argue that Bunuba and Ku Waru optional ergative marking in this context can be accounted for by an extended version of Hopper and Thompson''s notion of object individuation, in which the grammar treats the metalinguistic relationship between reported speech and that which reports it as analogous to that between Patient and Agent in canonical transitive clauses. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Very little has been written on the grammar of complement constructions in Australian Aboriginal languages. Grammars rarely provide much information, and few references treat the topic either in particular languages or cross-linguistically. This paper addresses this lacuna with a typological investigation of thought complements in the languages of the continent. Some languages show evidence of a separate construction type for coding propositional thoughts. In most Australian languages it seems that a limited range of verbs can be employed in the matrix clause; these usually include generic verbs meaning 'say, do, think' or 'hear, think'. Two other constructions resemble the reported thought construction, a type of desiderative, and mistaken belief constructions; the major grammatical features of these constructions are discussed. In most languages there is no compelling evidence that the clause of thought serves as an argument of the matrix clause, and thus the construction is not a complement construction in the traditional sense. Rather, what is involved is framing – a relation distinct from both embedding and dependency; some issues with this analysis are discussed and resolved. The investigation is based on a corpus of just over seventy languages, partly a convenience sample (depending on available information) and partly a representative one (the major geographical regions and families are included, albeit unevenly). • A limited number of verbs of thought frame complements in Australian languages. • Most common matrix verbs are generic, meaning 'say, do, think' and 'hear, think'. • Desideratives are sometimes represented in the manner of thought complements. • A distinct mistaken belief construction is found in many Australian languages. • An analysis in terms of framing and/or scope is plausible and accounts for the meaning of thought complements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide prevention training in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is a national health priority in Australia. This paper describes a qualitative study to increase understanding of how a mobile application (app) could be used to support suicide prevention gatekeepers in Indigenous communities. We respectfully use the term Indigenous to refer to Australian peoples of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander descent. Two participatory design workshops were held with 12 participants who were either Indigenous health workers or community members. The workshops first explored what knowledge, skills, and support suicide prevention gatekeepers in Indigenous communities may require, as well as how technology, specifically mobile apps, could be used to support these needs. Qualitative analysis identified four themes related to perceptions of who gatekeepers are, their role requirements, technology and supporting resources, as well as broader community issues. Participants thought training programs should target key, accessible, and respected people from diverse, designated, and emergent groups in Indigenous communities to act as gatekeepers, but requested an alternative, more culturally appropriate term to 'gatekeeper' (e.g., responder). Training should prepare gatekeepers for multifaceted suicide prevention roles, including the identification and management of at-risk Indigenous persons, the provision of psychoeducation and ongoing support, as well as facilitate integrated care in collaboration with community services. A combination of multiple support resources was recommended, including multi-platform options in the technology (e.g., mobile applications, social media) and physical domains (e.g., wallet cards, regular meetings). Recommended app features included culturally appropriate refresher content on suicide intervention, training recall, integrated care, how to access gatekeeper peer support, and debriefing. Broader community concerns on gatekeeper support needs were also considered. • Qualitative study explores new suicide prevention tools for Indigenous Australians. • Multi-platform technology and physical gatekeeper support resources recommended. • Key app functions include suicide intervention, refresher training, and referral. • Gatekeeper/responder selection criteria and training recommendations are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]