Search

When the results of the 1966 census came out shortly after the 1967 referendum, they revealed something new: Australia's Aboriginal population was growing, rapidly. This article examines white fears of an Aboriginal 'population explosion' and technocratic attempts to slow Aboriginal population growth during the twilight of assimilation policies and the beginnings of 'self-determination'. It turns to two projects: one conducted by various government departments in remote communities and another through the Family Planning Association of South Australia and Council of Aboriginal Women. As government intervention in Aboriginal lives shifted from top-down institutional approaches to funding Aboriginal organisations themselves to implement government policies, Aboriginal motherhood nonetheless remained a focus for state interventions. These interventions deployed discourses of liberal individualism, development, cultural restoration, and modernity that 'cloaked' objectives of population control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the 1970s, Christian missions to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were enthusiastic supporters of Indigenous self‐determination, even as they sought to maintain a missionary presence in Aboriginal communities. This article asks how missions continued to seek to influence and direct Aboriginal churches and communities through espousing self‐determination, and how Aboriginal leaders engaged with and exploited this apparent contradiction. Focusing on contributions to the missiological publication Nelen Yubu from Deacon Boniface Pedjert, Patrick Dodson, Miram Rose Ungunmerr‐Baumann, Dyiniyini Gondarra and Alice Kelly this article considers how Aboriginal leaders and thinkers managed and challenged non‐Indigenous expectations set for them around how their decolonisation was to proceed. Self‐determination, for missionaries, could be achieved by a new, supposedly more enlightened mission to "inculturate" the gospel. Whereas missionaries presumed Aboriginal church leaders' authority rested in their cultural authenticity, these Aboriginal leaders were also asserting other sources of authority including their culture, but especially the authority that arises from Country itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Settler Australia is sometimes said to have experienced a 'time revolution' on realizing that Aboriginal people have dwelt here for millennia, mirroring the earlier European 'time revolution' when Europeans discovered humanity's 'deep' past. This essay unpicks these twin 'revolutions' and explores how the idea of 'time revolutions' serves a settler society such as Australia. I suggest that celebration of quantitative 'revolutions' obscures qualitative shifts in European times and sidelines Indigenous way-of-being in time. I wonder about the possibility of a more fundamental 'time revolution', that is, a turning to see that time might not be simply linear, universal and homogenous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In seeking to understand the deep past, the knowledges of First Nations peoples and of the various academic disciplines can seem incommensurable. In this essay, we argue the concept of "historicities", that is, the encultured ways of narrating and conceiving of the past offers to enrich the study of deep history. Sensitivity to the various ways the past is remembered and understood, as well as the ways in which these historicities are dialogically and relationally constructed, offers ways of bringing distinct accounts of the deep past into conversation. Through closely reading various narrations of deep histories of the Tiwi Islands, we suggest ways in which historicities might be understood as coexisting and in relation, without reducing their accounts to a single universalizable story of the past or hierarchy of knowledges. This special issue further explores decolonizing challenges to ways of knowing the deep past from a range of disciplinary perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the possibilities of a deep history practice that engages with rather than sidelines Indigenous historical knowledges. Many Indigenous people insist that their knowledge of the deep past demands engagement. They do so, we suggest, because scientific historicism and Indigenous knowledge-systems and historicities already impinge upon and inform each other: they are intertwined. We propose 'deep listening' as a way historians might contribute to bringing these practices of deep history into more explicit conversation and address some of the challenges of doing so. Finally, we consider the example of the deep history of the Willandra Lakes in New South Wales Australia, revealing how this approach might allow for a more mutually satisfying deep history of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Aboriginal rock art artists, drawing together insights from the disciplines of archaeology and biography, as well as from Indigenous knowledge-holders, in order to explore the life and work of a relatively unknown rock painter from western Arnhem Land in Australia: Narlim (born c. 1909). His rock art at Warlkarr (Hawk Dreaming) in Kakadu National Park stands as subtle but powerful testament to his life, his family and unbroken connections to Country. Narlim's art reveals the ways he creatively engaged with new knowledges and skills introduced by the newcomers to his Country, even as he asserted the enduring traditions and ongoing sovereignty of his people. By reading rock art as a historical source alongside other biographical material, in partnership with Traditional Owners of today, we offer a fresh and holistic approach to better understanding rock art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1950s, anthropologist Jane Goodale had bright hopes for her informant Happy Cook, an Aboriginal girl from the Tiwi Islands in North Australia, who she considered constrained by paternalistic government policies. Goodale was devastated witnessing Cook's suffering over following decades. Looking at Goodale's feelings of friendship turned to grief over the second half of the twentieth century, this article reveals a crisis of self-understanding among researchers in late twentieth-century Australia. This grief, originally private for Goodale, became increasingly public and performed in white anthropologists' discourse as they wrote on Aboriginal communities' experience. Goodale later concluded that this supposedly new era was, in many ways, similar to what had come before, a conclusion that brought on a grief shared by many of her generation. Her experience reveals how ethnographers' subjective dilemmas and their performances of anti-racism through friendship shifted as they entered what they hoped to be a post-colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including sayings of Jesus in Mark's Gospel dealing with marriage, problem of marriage in "Heathen" congregations and religious belief shaped sexual and marital behaviour.

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians and anthropologists have increasingly argued that the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity occurred as they wove the new faith into their traditions. Yet this finding risks overshadowing how Indigenous peoples themselves understood the history of Christianity in their societies. This article, a case study of the Tiwi of North Australia, is illustrative in that it uses Tiwi oral histories of the 'conversion' of a priest in order to invert assumptions about inculturation and conversion. They insist that they did not accommodate the new faith but that the Catholic Church itself converted in embracing them. Their history suggests that conversion can occur as communities change in the act of incorporating new peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remembering Bishop Hale: Edited by Jane Lydon. Their discoverer was Sophie Hale and the books were diaries of her great-grandfather: the missionary and colonial bishop, Mathew Blagden Hale. The volume is especially valuable for the way it draws together perspectives from church historians with university historians to reveal the nuances of the religious dynamics of Hale's colonial and imperial worlds. [Extracted from the article]

In the late 1950s, the Christian mission to the Anindilyakwa Aboriginal people of Groote Eylandt, North Australia, was in disarray over the question of marriage. Missionaries thought they had won Aboriginal people to their system of monogamous marriage, conducive to Australian citizenship and consistent with Christian teaching. But a series of ‘marriage disturbances’ suggested their confidence was premature. In Aboriginal English, to ‘marry straight’ (as opposed to ‘close’) means to marry according to a complex kinship system which arises from clans’ spiritual relationships to the land. I argue that foregrounding Aboriginal conceptions of marriage – that is, alternative indigenous ways of marrying ‘straight’ – reveals that Aboriginal people were doing more than simply rejecting missionary monogamy. The role of kinship in re-creating Aboriginal systems of land tenure and social order reveals marriage as an important site of resistance to the (sometimes contradictory) settler-colonial encroaches of both missionaries and the state. It also demonstrates that Aboriginal people had their own spiritual and social priorities for marriage that were not oriented around the intrusions of colonisers. While they acted to resist missionary visions of Christian citizenship and Western conceptions of heterosexual monogamy, they also worked to uphold their own kinship systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the feminist preacher Maude Royden (1876–1956) toured Australia in 1928, she promoted modern religion for modern women. This article examines the Australian press coverage of Royden’s visit to shed light on the complex relationships between religion, modernity and the female body as they were constituted in Australia in the 1920s. In doing so, this article contributes to growing historiographic debate concerning the intersections of modernity and religion and serves to disrupt further those narratives which have presumed processes of modernisation and secularisation to be running in parallel. Australian newspapers eagerly spread the news of Royden assuming the previously masculine space of the pulpit and they promoted her new form of Christianity as scientifically credible and suited to modern Australia women’s lives. In advancing my analysis, I also compare Royden’s press reception in Australia to that of her contemporary, Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944). McPherson likewise also offered a religious response to modernity and a new religious femininity, but the Australian media showed comparatively little interest in her visit. I argue that although religious femininities were being recrafted for modernity in the pages of Australian newspapers, only certain expressions of religiosity and modern femininity were considered compatible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the ways local mission and national politics shaped linguistic research work in mid-20th century Australia through examining the case of the Church Missionary Society's Angurugu Mission on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory and research into the Anindilyakwa language. The paper places missionary linguistics in the context of broader policies of assimilation and national visions for Aboriginal people. It reveals how this social and political climate made linguistic research, largely neglected in the 1950s (apart from some notable exceptions), not only possible, but necessary by the 1970s. Finally, it comments on the state of research into Aboriginal languages and the political climate of today. Until the 1950s, the demands of funding and commitment to a government policy of assimilation into white Australia meant that the CMS could not support linguistic research and opportunities for academic linguists to conduct research into Anindilyakwa were limited. By the 1960s, however, national consensus about the future of Aboriginal people and their place in the Australian nation shifted and governments reconsidered the nature of their support for Christian missions. As the 'industrial mission' model of the 1950s was no longer politically or economically viable, the CMS looked to reinvent itself, to find new ways of maintaining its evangelical influence on Groote Eylandt. Linguistics and research into Aboriginal cultures - including in partnership with secular academic agents - were a core component of this reinvention of mission, not only for the CMS but more broadly across missions to Aboriginal people. The resulting collaboration across organisations proved remarkably productive from a research perspective and enabled the continuance of a missionary presence and relevance. The political and financial limitations faced by missions shaped, therefore, not only their own practice with regards to linguistic research, but also the opportunities for linguists beyond the missionary fold. The article concludes that, in Australia, the two bodies of linguists - academic and missionary - have a shared history, dependent on similar political, social and financial forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judith Stokes had always hoped to be a missionary linguist and translate the Bible. But on her arrival at Angurugu, the Church Mission Society of Australia (CMS) Aboriginal Mission on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory in 1952 as a schoolteacher, she discovered that linguists were not required. By looking at the experiences of Judith Stokes, I shed light on the tensions embedded in the evangelical missionary project in mid-twentieth century Australia. Traditionally evangelicals claimed that global conversion would flow from translating Bibles into local vernaculars. In Australia, however, concerns to integrate Aboriginal people into Australian citizenship through assimilation rendered the traditional evangelical approach problematic. Aboriginal missions were “different” from others, the CMS claimed—so different that some were unsure whether they were even real missions. Stokes' story reveals the contradictions within Australian evangelical communities between their global mission and their commitment to what they envisaged as an anti-racist policy of assimilation. Moreover, her status as a woman translator challenged CMS gendered conventions for Aboriginal missions and conceptions of the missionary vocation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On our blue planet, oceans have long shaped human histories. Generations have crossed the seas, fished their depths, and navigated their currents, encountering new peoples and places on the waves and on the shores. In this roundtable discussion, edited by Ruth Morgan and Laura Rademaker, we reflect on just how oceans have shaped deep human pasts and how we can recover ocean histories from the deep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This provocative issue of the I Journal of Australian Studies i offers a range of perspectives that challenge orthodox understandings of some of the key concepts underpinning the broad field of Australian studies scholarship. Michelle Carey begins by problematising both settler colonial theory and critical whiteness studies and their role in supporting advocacy scholarship. Of salacious interest to the public, the story of this divorce reveals much about the society inhabited by the couple. [Extracted from the article]

An introduction for the periodical "Journal of Australian Studies" is presented in which editor discusses articles within this issue including prevailing mythologies in Australia.

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including relations between Indigenous and settler Australians, importance of book clubs and difficulties of the professionalisation of social work.