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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]

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]

This paper explores the meaning of indigeneity in the southern Gulf country by focusing upon a group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who claim as a common ancestor a pioneering non-Aboriginal pastoralist. This early settler established a large cattle property on the Northern Territory/Queensland border at the end of the nineteenth century, where he participating in frontier violence as well as attempts to resolve such violence and promote more peaceable relations through various kinds of exchange, including the common-law marriage of his part-Aboriginal son to the daughter of a local Aboriginal leader. Drawing on Taussig's reflections on the economy of mimesis and alterity in colonial exchange, I analyse the ways in which different kinds of connections to the property in question have been phrased by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descendants of this man, as well as other local people, from first settlement in the 1860s through to the contemporary moment, when multiple and overlapping assertions of indigenous belonging by Aboriginal people intersect with articulations of an emergent autochthony amongst non-Aboriginal Australians with long histories of residence in the area. [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]

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]

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]

Bruce was appointed to the Chair of Anthropology at UQ in 1975, moving to Brisbane with his wife Barbara Rigsby and their children Mark and Jan. Bruce's scholarly range was broad. Bruce Joseph Rigsby (1937-2022) was a fieldwork-oriented linguist and social anthropologist who maintained a lifelong connection with Native Americans of the Southern Plateau of the Pacific North-west, especially "Sahaptian vowel systems through time" and Nass-Gitksan peoples but others as well. Barbara's life/work balance held Bruce's work/work balance somewhat in check over many valiant years, and her care for Bruce in the years following his stroke was heroic. [Extracted from the article]

Responds to a critique of the book 'Native Title and the Descent of Rights.' Criticisms on the approach to understanding Aboriginal kinship in Australia.

The terms Indigenous and non-Indigenous are commonplace in Australia yet remain under-theorised as categories which differentiate identities. In this introductory article, we overview developments in the intercultural over the last decade, focusing on the ways in which identities of Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, Black and White are relationally constructed. We also consider intersections between the intercultural and the Intervention, a major turning point in Indigenous affairs policy with related impacts in anthropology over this period. In particular we draw attention to the need for ethnographies that show equal attention to non-Indigenous residents and propose the themes of intimacies and temporalities as key avenues for addressing this relationality. Articles contained in this special issue go some way to addressing this need, illustrating the complex ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous lives are lived together, or alongside each other, around Australia today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that although Pacific arts began to be largely recognised in Australia in the 1990s, Pacific artists based in Australia remained mostly invisible in the contemporary art scene until the mid‐2000s. I aim to demonstrate how Pacific artists and curators—who in some cases collaborated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and curators—have made visible myriad Pacific identities and social trajectories in Australian cities. Exhibitions reveal and highlight multiple experiences of Pacific people residing in Australia, for whom Pacific cultures are partly mediated by the experiences of their relatives, popularised by museum collections and coloured by the gaze of non‐Pacific people. This article is built around two cultural events that have not previously received scholarly attention, a group show curated in Sydney by Māori artist and cultural worker Keren Ruki and a triennial in Brisbane imagined and organised by Bundjalung Yugambeh (Aboriginal Australian) artist and curator Jenny Fraser. It addresses how narratives in the 2000s were often connected to objectives of empowerment and the necessity to build a future for Pacific peoples in Australian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Koori Radio was founded in Redfern in 1993 as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander radio station. Its aim was to give a voice to these communities, acting as a counterpoint to their stereotyped representation in mainstream media and promoting their creative practices (especially music). Rather than 'thinking only Aboriginal', it has increasingly embraced the ongoing multicultural diversity of modern Sydney, as well as re‐articulating Aboriginality with transnational Indigeneity and Blackness. A Koori Radio worker explained this change as 'a Black thing of people of colour who have the same struggles and understand each other'. This approach has not been without controversy, with many activists calling for greater emphasis on Aboriginal identity and specific struggles. Ethnographic research at Koori Radio shows, however, that the connections made between different communities have enhanced, rather than diminished, the capacity of Koori Radio to fulfill its objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a reply to the comments made on the book 'Native Title and the Descent of Rights' about the Aborigines. Role of kinship to Aboriginal systems and societies in Australia; Distinction between the classical and post-classical in Aboriginal cultural history; Discussion of social changes in the Aboriginal society.

As I undertake fieldwork in my home-town area, I experience the familiar and the unfamiliar colliding, overlapping and interrelating in a critically productive, yet tense, dialectic. Questions arise for me such as: What is the field? What is home? When am I an anthropologist? When am I a local? By looking at the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in my home-town area, I am able to briefly explore these questions and come to a position where I sense the need for anthropology to look to comparative strategies (whereby difference and similarity are seen in relation to each other). This I see as a corrective to an overly contrastive approach which prioritises the representation of difference between cultural groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of an Aboriginal songline in South‐eastern Australia that has not been previously recorded. As part of a project examining the astronomy and songline connections of the Saltwater Aboriginal peoples of the New South Wales coast, the Black Duck Songline was identified that may have links to the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades, known by many peoples as the Seven Sisters, is one of the most important elements of Aboriginal cosmologies across Australia, and features in songlines and oral traditions, as well as being a resource calendar identifier. Aboriginal songlines are a unique development of Aboriginal culture that celebrate the travels of the Creator Ancestors as they shaped the landscape. The identification of the Black Duck Songline and its possible connection to the Pleiades is an example of the potential reawakening of other long‐distance songlines in Australia and their connection to the cosmology of their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal Australians carefully observe the properties and positions of stars, including both overt and subtle changes in their brightness, for subsistence and social application. These observations are encoded in oral tradition. I examine two Aboriginal oral traditions from South Australia that describe the periodic changing brightness in three pulsating, red‐giant variable stars: Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis), Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri), and Antares (Alpha Scorpii). The Australian Aboriginal accounts stand as the only known descriptions of pulsating variable stars in any Indigenous oral tradition in the world. Researchers examining these oral traditions over the last century, including anthropologists and astronomers, missed the descriptions of these stars as being variable in nature as the ethnographic record contained several misidentifications of stars and celestial objects. Arguably, ethnographers working on Indigenous Knowledge Systems should have academic training in both the natural and social sciences [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long attempted to come to grips with Indigenous Australian sorcery beliefs and especially with the idea that acts with no understandable efficacy bring about illness and death. In this ethnographic interpretation of sorcery beliefs in the remote community of Numbulwar, I follow those few who have attempted to find a link between these apparently harmless acts and real physiological consequences, arguing that the fear of sorcery that pervades Numbulwar contributes directly to the stress of daily life and indirectly to the premature morbidity and mortality of too many lives. Belief is posited as the mechanism whereby the human stress response is activated to a harmful extent, a process in which the projection of envious feelings may often be critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is based on my conviction that Australian ethnography's narrow purview and anthropology's theoretical limitations need exploring and explaining. While internationally the discipline developed new sites, new theoretical fields and new political ideas in the post-colonial era from around 1970, classicism continued to dominate research in Australia. New forms of Aboriginal social life and politics created by changing 'post-colonial' conditions largely escaped ethnographic attention, but anthropology was rescued from irrelevance with the emergence of opportunities to assist the courts and Aborigines with land retrievals. By examining selected ethnographies and exceptions to the discipline's main trajectory, I hope to encourage reflection and expansion so that the discipline might realise its potential as the most radical and critical of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a protest-based environmental movement in Australia. We outline here the history of the unstable meeting of environmentalism and Aboriginal interests, before turning to Marcia Langton's recent critique of the progressive 'green left' in Australia. We summarise Langton's argument: environmentalists would deny Aboriginal groups the benefits that flow from native title-related agreements; environmentalists live at luxurious distance from the realities of remote and rural Aboriginal poverty and social problems; environmentalists exalt 'noble savages'. We critique these claims on the basis that they pay inadequate attention to the structural inequities that underpin the market in native title interests and, further, deny the reality that Aboriginal groups often seek to form strategic alliances with green groups, arguing for conservation of their country on their own-or shared-terms. We argue that any appraisal of the present status of 'green-black' relations needs to consider these factors seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint management at Kakadu National Park has been marked by conflict and discontent among the major actors, its Traditional Aboriginal Owners and the White rangers (and other staff) of the state. Despite such conflict, and structured differences between these groups of actors, the park continues to function. In this article I argue that the structures and actions perpetuating difference and conflict are usually more or less balanced by opposing structures and actions that draw the two groups of actors together. I further argue that the most important of such cohering structures and actions, what I call 'common discourse', derives from the work that both Aboriginal and White rangers perform in the field. This form of under-recognised discourse acts against the corrosive discourses of the separate groups that tend to perpetuate separateness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do emotion terms matter to the study of Aboriginal sociality and exchange? The study of affect/emotion is often considered a speciality topic or focus in anthropology. However, in this article I argue that a consideration of terms and concepts associated with affect/emotion is critical to a fully nuanced appreciation of the way Yolŋu people consider value in material exchange. I seek to move away from prevailing approaches to the study of Aboriginal exchange in Australia, to focus on exchange relations as they are cast and constituted in local Yolŋu terms. Drawing on the key body of terms and concepts associated with affect and emotion in Gumatj (a Yolŋu language), I explore a number of case studies to show how they not only inform, but motivate and shape forms of exchange in unique and specific ways. What is part of the emotion lexicon in Gumatj, I argue, can also be seen as a partial template or schema of value. This template is similar to what Munn (1986) refers to as a generative schema or value template. This article is a preliminary exploration towards a local Yolŋu theory of value and exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word 'envy' directs attention to feelings and cognitions that are especially important sources of information in our complicated sociality. As it is delimited by philosophers, economists, psychologists and others, envy is conceptually nested within a family that includes evil eye beliefs, inequity aversion, strong reciprocity and social comparison. Although the accumulation of work in these areas is substantial, anthropological treatments of envy are rare. Given repeated assertions of envy's universality and its potential importance for understanding widespread aspects of the human condition, a comparative eye seems essential. I present an account of 'jealous' in Aboriginal Australia via a framework that casts emotions as emerging from the interaction of psychobiological and sociocultural processes. According to this perspective, 'envy' should not be regarded as an invariant human condition but rather as a Western version of what, in a more generic human form, may both defend the individual and the larger sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If anthropology aims at 'understanding 'others' ', then obviously anthropologists must be interested in the meaning of what those 'others' say. But to understand what speakers of a language other than our own say, we need to know what exactly the words and grammatical categories of that other language mean. This article argues that translating indigenous categories into academic English does not allow us to capture indigenous perspectives and leads to what Geertz calls 'scripting other people's souls'. Focusing on cognitive and cultural categories from Australian Aboriginal languages usually linked with English labels such as 'kinship obligations' and 'odd-numbered generations', the article shows how the ways of thinking encoded in these languages can be explicated from the insider's point of view, in simple words and simple sentences directly cross-translatable into the indigenous languages themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A. P. Elkin, who had dominated Australian anthropology since his appointment to the Chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1934, was concerned that coinciding with his retirement in 1955 was the possibility of the demise of Aboriginal anthropology as the core of the Sydney department. He thus attempted to influence the University authorities in their selection of his chosen successor, Ronald Murray Berndt. Such a selection would ensure the continuance of the department as the pre-eminent authority on all matters to do with Aboriginal ethnography and affairs, and maintain its critical role in the formulation of policy with mission bodies and government. The other long-serving member of the department, H. Ian Hogbin, was equally determined to see this did not happen. Hogbin wanted an appointment of a scholar who was in no way connected to Elkin. This would address the problem, inadvertently, of changing the focus of the department and would open the possibility of a shift in theoretical orientation and renewal. This article examines the machinations of the protagonists, the selection process, the quality of the candidates and the role of the mostly British-based referees, especially the LSE-based anthropologists Raymond Firth and Isaac Schapera, in shaping and influencing the decision to appoint the Africanist J. A. Barnes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attachment of Australian Aboriginal people to land has not only been amply documented by anthropologists since the late 19th century, it is also one of their own enduring tropes of differentiation from non-Aboriginal and 'official' Australian state society. In the face of widespread and concerted alteration of the pre-settlement landscape engendered by industrial and commercial development, Aboriginal people seek to reclaim or reappropriate remnants of a pristine environment untransformed by modern development. Alteration of the landscape, as far as Aboriginal people are concerned, also goes hand in hand with the progressive decimation of Aboriginal populations in the 19th and early 20th centuries through violence and disease. Contemporary Aboriginal communities seek to protect the sites of violent death, believed heavily populated with the frustrated spirits of the deceased, from disturbance, particularly by non-Aboriginal people. In this chapter I discuss some of the anthropological implications of seeing landscape as a terrain of intercultural conjunction in such a bifold society in northern New South Wales, and what levels of transformation are and are not acknowledged by a marginal, minority indigenous population seeking to insulate their historical landscape from development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In western Sydney, I found an extreme version of what I propose is a national Aboriginal mythopoeia, that is, a powerful system of beliefs and practices in relation to Aboriginal people and culture. A reified Aboriginal culture is promoted at institutional sites and in reconciliation discourses that evokes the presence of something precious and mysterious that must be re-read into local Aboriginal people, but which assiduously avoids their actual circumstances and subjectivities. The awkward relationships and avoidances evident in a western Sydney reconciliation group are posited as a benign example of this mythology, born of a 'sentimental politics' of regret and reparation at work in Australia. Unity between the state and civil society is evident here, thus requiring an analysis that goes beyond a critique of government policies and programmes as intentional and rational, and grasps the nature of the widespread desire for Aboriginality. Through ethnographic attention to the actual relationships of Indigenous people and others, anthropologists can avoid being complicit in this regressive, separatist construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a range of Western Arrernte terms employed by missionaries at Hermannsburg to translate the Bible and the Lutheran liturgy and hymns. My argument is that initially words were employed as metaphors in order to convey a Christian transcendental and ritual order quite different from the Arrernte one the terms had named previously. I examine the events and the Western Arrernte response that, over time, redefined some terms and shaped an Arrernte Christian vernacular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The claim of most town whites that Aboriginal people of Wilcannia make art but have no culture and the claim by Aboriginal people of the town that their art work and art designs demonstrate their culture and cultural traditions opens up the powerful and productive dimensions of art and culture for closer scrutiny. In so doing, the ambivalence and ambiguity which saturates these categories is ethnographically revealed. How can the presence and production of artworks in Wilcannia and the white denial of culture be considered? Why indeed do these questions matter, in what ways do they matter, and to whom do they matter? How do the categories of traditional/remote, urban/settled and their avatars intersect with black and white notions of Aboriginal art and Aboriginal culture discursively and experientially? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on our understanding of racism towards Aboriginal people in Australia through an examination of discriminatory belief structures pervasive in the mainstream community as evidenced through the important social field of country football in regional Victoria. It analyses the power and pervasiveness of the racial stereotyping that exists in some segments of the community by using Langton's (1997) notion of 'iconic images' as well as discussing the importance of particular ideological motivations around values such as 'egalitarianism'. This is achieved through analysing the views of players, supporters and officials of mainstream clubs towards the Aboriginal Rumbalara Football Netball Club. This analysis is structurally situated within a broader understanding of Australian national identity, in particular looking at the intersection of the powerful cultural domains of sport and evolving expressions of whiteness and egalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talks about the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC). Changes in governance that caused the abolition of ATSIC; Reforms that occurred in the Australian government since the early 1990s; Intention of the government in introducing a new regime of governance.

Discusses the frameworks of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) for Aboriginal governance. Authority given by the proposed structures for the establishment of ATSIC to the Aboriginal people of Australia; Effect of the establishment of ATSIC on the country; Strategy that can improve the accountability of ATSIC; Concerns that arise from the constitution of the proposed regional form of organisation.

Explores the dimensions of the mainstreaming counter-narrative that has accompanied the demise of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC). Comment of a party leader that would put doubt on the mainstreaming of Aboriginal economic and social conditions; Changes proposed by the counter-narrative in the Aboriginal community; Implication of the dumping of the Reeves Review of a mainstreaming narrative called the "Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976" for the Aborigines; Event that illustrates the cultural impact of the allocation of the responsibilities of ATSIC.