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Indigenous research methodologies prioritize community voices, perspectives, and stories. In Australia, yarning has emerged as a promising Indigenous oral history research methodology. Taking many forms for different purposes, common features of yarning include un-structured or semi-structured research interviews and discussion, flexible time schedules and Indigenous facilitation. Yarning is valued as a culturally appropriate and safe research conversational methodology that has the potential to yield findings and conclusions that are not always possible via traditional archive-based research. In this paper, we introduce a case study of yarning used specifically in a sport history research project in Australia. The focus is on a group of teenage girls from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in Queensland who competed in marching in the 1950s and 1960s and offer a rare example of female Indigenous participation in organized sport during the oppressive 'protection era'. Urged to 'tell our story' by surviving marchers, who are now community elders, we approached this research methodologically in two ways: archival-based research and yarning. The results from these two approaches were vastly different, and highlight the value of this oral history methodology in producing rich insight and counter-narratives to those available from traditional empirical sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first international tour by an Australian sports team was the 1868 tour of England undertaken by a group of Aboriginal cricketers. In the following 148 years there have been many histories of the tour written. This paper undertakes a historiographical examination of the tour, contextualizing the writings and their place in Australian society. In doing so, it uncovers the phases of reporting, forgetting, rediscovery, exploiting, ambivalent times, and self-determination that representations of the tour go through. It is argued that these phases provide an analogy for the positioning of Indigenous people and Indigenous history in Australian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper's main concern is how educators can best face the challenge of teaching Australia's history of frontier violence. Understandably, high school and undergraduate students are wary of such a dark topic that draws in massacres, rapes and allegations of genocide. However, if teachers steer clear of the controversial material, students are left with significantly reduced understandings of why Australian race relations can be so strained. Ignoring the full story of colonisation undermines reconciliation and augments a racial divide. Ignoring frontier violence also strengthens imperialism's capacity to render subjugated people 'invisible'. The curriculum's requirement to teach Australian Aboriginal history in partnership with Indigenous community members is therefore a crucial way of dispelling invisibility and reasserting the legitimate rights of Indigenous peoples to their intangible heritage. Shared teaching humanises the impact of colonisation and frontier violence on Australia's First Peoples, and protects, maintains and respects Indigenous knowledge, practices and innovations. This is the first paper to indicate that Western Australia's 1927 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Killing and Burning of Bodies of Aborigines in East Kimberley and into Police Methods when Effecting Arrests may be the plot source for Arthur Upfield's (1961[1931]) novel The Sands of Windee and for the Murchison murders (1929-30). The case study's example of Kimberley Aboriginal people becoming 'invisible' leads into an overview of imperialism, where invisibility is implicated in the process of colonisation. The paper then illustrates how collaborative teaching benefits students, teachers and Indigenous people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In considering the historical treatment of Aboriginal Australians this paper will discuss the different spaces operating in Western Australia’s South West in the late 1920s and the government policies that fed into them. These are the Moore River Native Settlement that is located some 100 km north of Perth and White City, a carnival sideshow located at the bottom of William Street on the banks of the Swan River in Perth. The 1905 Aborigines Act and a provision within that act known as the Proclamation of the Prohibited Area of Perth will be discussed. This will be done by comparing the ways that White City was seen by the government in the 1920s and how in recent years Northbridge has been regulated and discursively constructed. The intent is to look at how Aboriginal people have been treated over time and consider the social, historical and political forces that have shaped that construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the continent of the Australian Aborigines was colonised, most commentary on the ‘natives’ was in terms of being child-like and that the state of being of the native personified the basic elements of nature. Over the twentieth century—while attempting simultaneously to preserve and extinguish the ‘tangible form’ and the ‘true nature’ of the Aborigine—much effort was directed towards biologically and socially transmuting the substance of the native into a mimicry of whiteness through the application of science and the employment of Christianity. The following is an explanatory treatise discussing a noteworthy grouping of interactions between a number of bureaucrats, politicians, missionaries and anthropologists who—although dedicated to constructing a new (white) existence for Aboriginal people—could never quite disengage from simplistic characterisations of the people for whom they were advocating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aboriginal Protectorates operated in the late 1830s and 1840s in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales (later to become the colony of Victoria) in Australia and New Zealand. This article examines a small selection of the extensive archive of Port Phillip and New Zealand Protectorates to illustrate the ways that language and communication work within colonial projects to support and extend colonial authority. Examining language acquisition by Protectors, it places attitudes to and use of Indigenous languages within the context of colonialism in each site, arguing that Indigenous voices in New Zealand were co-opted, and in Port Phillip were marginalised, in the service of divergent approaches to dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their land. The article also explores glimpses of Māori or Aboriginal experiences of humanitarianism, colonisation, and dispossession captured in this archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools and communities are diverse and complex sites shaped by contrasting geographies, languages, histories and cultures, including historical and ongoing relationships with colonialism, and connected yet contextually unique epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies.This paper explores the history of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra) populations, including the establishment of incorporated communities and schools across the tri-state remote region of central Australia. This study will show that Anangu have a relatively recent contact history with Europeans and Anangu experiences of engagement with colonisation and schooling are diverse and complex.By describing historical patterns of population centralisation and decentralisation, I argue that schooling and broader education policies need to be contextually responsive to Anangu histories, values, ontologies and epistemologies in order to produce an education approach that resists colonialist social models and assumptions and instead, works more effectively towards a broader aim of social justice. Through assisting educators and policy makers to acquire a clearer understanding of Anangu histories, capacities and struggle, I hope to inform a more nuanced, contextually responsive and socially-just consideration of the provision of Western education in the tri-state region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In various parts of the world, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are actively working towards Reconciliation. In Australia, the context in which we each undertake our work as educationalists and researchers, the Reconciliation agenda has been pushed into schools and English teachers have been called on to share responsibility for facilitating the move towards a new national order. The recently introduced Australian Curriculum mandates that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures be embedded with "a strong" but "varying presence" into each learning area (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2013). In this paper we consider the tensions between policy and practice, when discourses external to education are recontextualised into the discipline of English. We do so by applying an analytical framework based on Bernstein's (1990, 1996, 2000) sociological theories about the structure of instructional and regulative discourses. Our findings suggest that the space to exert Reconciliatory agendas in the Australian Curriculum English is ambiguous and thus holds the potential to not only marginalise Indigenous knowledges but also to create tensions between policy and practice for non-Indigenous teachers of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a case study into the historiography of the Convincing Ground toponym at Portland Bay, Victoria, Australia. This study shows that research by into the usage of the phrase 'convincing ground' in nineteenth-century Australia is superficial, and his preference for one explanation of the origin of the Convincing Ground toponym that relates to intra-whaler conflict resolution is superficial and inadequate. This analysis supports the alternative narrative that the toponym has its origin in a dispute between whalers and Aborigines over possession of a beached whale. Furthermore, Connor failed to consider the possibility that the phrase 'convincing ground' is polysemous, which means that we should not expect to find a singular homogenous explanation or application in the literature. He also failed to discuss the real possibility that the Convincing Ground may also be a onomastic palimpsest and that both the Aboriginal-whaler dispute narrative and the intra-whaler dispute narrative may be legitimate explanations relevant at particular moments in the place's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1870s, an intense quest revealed to scientists that pituri, an important Aboriginal commodity, was sourced from the plant Duboisia hopwoodii–a shrub named after a well-known colonist. But it was Aboriginal people and white explorer-pastoralists from the Mulligan River region in far western Queensland who provided the samples and alerted scientists to the important chemical properties of pituri. Subsequently, there was a proposal to change the name of the plant to Duboisia pituri. Whom should the plant have been named after, the colonist or the Aborigine? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 1853 a group of Māori crew on the ship William Hyde docked in Newcastle, where they met Awabakal people dancing and responded with a haka. When the William Hyde returned to New Zealand, four Aboriginal men joined the crew. In this article, by developing an analysis that moves beyond histories of Indigenous peoples as individuals to contemplate histories of Indigenous community responses to colonisation, I attempt to understand this encounter and connection which leaves only a trace in the colonial archive. Drawing on recent historiography of Indigenous mobilities, I explore the possibilities of mutual recognition of sovereignties and shared experiences of colonisation and reassess 'traditional' representations of Indigenous travellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the calls for truth-telling that emerged from the Regional Dialogues that informed the Uluru Convention and Statement issued by a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples at the 2017 First Nations Constitutional Convention at Uluru, Northern Territory. It explores the denial of the history of indigenous Australians. The need for greater public education and cultural competency training for people who interact with indigenous Australians is explained.

This article considers how shifting programs of Aboriginal protection in nineteenth-century Australia responded to Indigenous mobility as a problem of colonial governance and how they contributed over time to creating an emergent discourse of the Aboriginal "vagrant." There has been surprisingly little attention to how the legal charge of vagrancy became applied to Indigenous people in colonial Australia before the twentieth century, perhaps because the very notion of the Aboriginal vagrant was subject to ambivalence throughout much of the nineteenth century. When vagrancy laws were first introduced into Australia's colonies, Aboriginal people were exempt from them as a group not yet subject to the ordinary regulatory codes of colonial society. Bringing them within the protective fold of colonial social order was one of the principal tasks of the office of 'protection' that was introduced into three Australian jurisdictions during the late 1830s. As the nineteenth century progressed and Aboriginal people became more susceptible to social order policing, a concept of Indigenous vagrancy hardened into place, and programs of protection became central to its management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have acknowledged that terms such as ‘margin’ or ‘fringe’ do not encapsulate the spatial experience of excluded communities living in post-settlement Australia, yet there is only a small body of work on the detail and implications of these experiences. This article uses the riverside garden of Chinese-born Willie Sang, near Mackay, Queensland, as a fine-grained example of a ‘subversive space’, drawing on a previously unanalysed archive of Queensland government-issued ‘Informal Leases’. It demonstrates the complexity of Sang's space and others like it through the detail of his experience and by embedding it in a wider history than that of Chinese market gardeners in Queensland. It argues that understanding Sang's garden in this way shifts any narrative which characterises white settlement as comprehensive, and provides detail on how, in contrast to the way such spaces have been understood, they encapsulated persistence, adaptation and longevity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like some other oral traditions of Australian Aborigines, those that relate to widespread and enduring coastal inundation appear to be several thousand years old. The best-documented traditions, some mythologised, are presented for six sites around the Australian coast (Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Territory; Rottnest, Carnac and Garden Islands, Western Australia; Spencer Gulf, South Australia; Kangaroo Island, South Australia; Port Phillip Bay, Victoria; Cairns and Fitzroy Island, Queensland). The minimum depths at which each tradition would have been true is determined from local bathymetry. These depths are then compared to postglacial sea-level history and minimum ages for each tradition calculated. These range from 7,500-13,400 years Before Present and represent unique observations of postglacial sea-level rise and its effects that have significant implications for an appreciation of the longevity of such traditions in preliterate societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics point out that a weakness of Lourandos’ ‘intensification’ paradigm for southwestern Victoria is a lack of dates for iconic fish traps of the Lake Condah region. McNiven et al. (2012) detailed excavations at Muldoons Trap Complex at Lake Condah in Gunditjmara Country, where charcoal recovered from channel infill sediments indicated initial construction at least 6600 cal. BP, making the site one of the world’s oldest known fish traps. Channel excavations also revealed the addition of basalt block walls dating to ca 600–800 cal. BP. Subsequent excavations at a second location at Muldoons demonstrate that a barrier/dam feature associated with artificial ponding of flood waters and containment of eels was added to the site complex ca 300–500 cal. BP and possibly elaborated in the nineteenth century. These results show that Muldoons Trap Complex underwent phased redevelopment and major elaboration over the past 800 years. This redevelopment followed little or no activity during the preceding 4000 years, which we argue reflected drier climatic conditions and the inability of flood waters to reach the site. Use of the site complex 5400–6600 and <800 years ago took advantage of regional increases in effective precipitation and lake water levels. Redevelopment of Muldoons Trap Complex within the past 800 years coincided with increased use of occupation sites across the broader region. Importantly, our research presents a methodological way forward to document the history of construction and use of stone-walled fish traps in the Lake Condah region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds new light on the outbreak of smallpox at Sydney Cove in 1789. It draws on local Eora traditions, corroborated by medical and historical sources, as a basis for gaining fresh insights into this event, for reviewing recent literature, and for re-examining several circumstances that could have led to the outbreak. The records suggest that the marines landed at Port Jackson with insufficient manpower and insufficient equipment for the tasks they were to confront. I argue that by early 1789 the colony faced huge difficulties, from the number of indigenous people opposing the settlers, from problems with agriculture, and from the lack of marines' capability to defend the settlement, that deploying smallpox became a viable option as a means of defence. This article concludes that, on balance, British officials probably spread smallpox as the only means left to defend the colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1933, the year of the Centenary of Emancipation and the ratification of the Forced Labour Convention at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the condition of Aboriginal workers in Australia drew the attention of groups interested in ‘native’ forced labour in other parts of the world. Aboriginal workers, while formally excluded from international intervention as the domestic concern of a member nation state, were considered during discussions between humanitarian circles (specifically the Anti-Slavery Society in London) and a leading international lawyer working for the ILO in Geneva. The article argues that the terms of the exchange, with its focus on the provision of wages to non-European, Indigenous labour, should be read in the context of a heightened interest in ‘anti-slavery’ during that year in coincidence with renewed international publicity concerning the failure of ‘protection’ in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1879, the New South Wales government took the unusual step of recommending the execution of three men—two white and one black—for two separate crimes of rape. The government's decision provoked outcry from capital punishment abolitionists who inundated the parliament and press with appeals for mercy, and held sensational public rallies decrying the use of the death penalty. Politicians' varied responses to the crimes show their preoccupations in ensuring ideals of colonial manliness and colonial honour remained intact no matter what the cost. This case offers an important example of the complex relationship between gender, race, sexuality and colonial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on Australia's colonial protectorates has examined the ways in which protectors largely failed in their humanitarian mission, as well as the ambivalent roles they played as agents of ‘civilisation’. Yet as well as representing ‘friends and benefactors’ of Aboriginal people, colonial protectors worked to bring them within the legal reach of police, courts and prisons. This article will compare the work of the protectorates during the 1840s in Port Phillip and South Australia with that of Western Australia, where a more systematic and forebodingly modern policy of Aboriginal governance existed. It argues that in Western Australia a logic of Aboriginal protection emerged through a principle of discipline and punishment facilitated by the distinctive policy regime of Governor Hutt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the representation of frontier history in contemporary Australian museums. Particular focus is given to the degree to which regional museums challenge prevalent ideas about frontier violence and Aboriginal dispossession. Topics discussed include collective memory, European settlers of Australia, and the differences between national and regional museums.

The Aitape frontal bone is compared to 13 late Pleistocene/early Holocene Australian crania as well as two modern samples comprised of 101 modern Australian and 126 modern new Guinea crania. These crania are compared using canonical variates analysis and Mahalanobis distances, the latter of which is examined for statistical significance using random expectation statistics. The results show that Aitape shares shape characteristics of a longer, flatter frontal with ancient Australians. Modern populations differ from both Aitape and the ancient Australians in having generally shorter, more curved frontals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing push from political parties, both conservative and Labor, and sections of the political class—opinion makers, journalists, and private think tanks—to equate knowledge of history with the concept of a 'national inheritance'. Implicit in this argument is the idea that history is something to which we owe fealty, that it is a body of knowledge, a national canon of events and stories, which we should embrace as a demonstration of patriotism; Anzac Day being the prime example. From a range of perspectives, this essay attempts to document, understand and critically evaluate this shift in Australia's public culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many hunter-gatherer-cultivators, including Indigenous Australians, intentionally manipulated their environments via three broad processes—inclusions (plant and animal translocations), exclusions (quarantining of certain plants and animals) and transitions (in situ change of biotas, landforms and hydrologies, often through fire). These environmental changes resulted in deliberately and strategically 'constructed landscapes' that not only supported societies but also established new contexts and conditions for cultural change. The structured and structuring nature of constructed landscapes is explored across the islands of Torres Strait of northeast Australia during the mid to late Holocene. Torres Strait Islanders deliberately imported and established the dog (dingo) while actively ensuring that cuscuses, cassowaries and pigs imported from New Guinea never produced viable populations on islands. Floral resources of islands were augmented by introducing a range of food crop staples and raw material plants through long-established contacts with peoples from New Guinea and more recent contacts with outsiders during the colonial era. Fire was a key tool of in situ vegetation change resulting in forest clearance and lowland sedimentation. These terrestrial activities supported, maintained and in some cases entrenched specialized marine lifeways in the region. In many respects, Torres Strait Islanders engineered the deterministic qualities of their own environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1960s Australian television program "Alcheringa," which featured Aboriginal Australians. The author focuses on how such television programs serve as a means of cultural memory. The author also discusses how "Aboriginality" was represented in the media and culture, and its relation to colonialism.

Traces the ethnohistory of the decline of the Kuwarra aboriginal people of Australia. Cultural survival; Impact of Europe-based legal and political structures; Ritual ties with traditional aboriginal groups.