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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]

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]

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]

In "Telling Tennant's Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence," Dean Ashenden explores the silences and omissions in Australian history, particularly regarding the experiences of Aboriginal people. Ashenden recounts his own journey back to Tennant Creek, where he grew up, and reflects on the absence of Aboriginal voices in the town's history. He examines the dynamics between influential white figures in shaping settler approaches to First Nations people, offering insights into their personalities and insecurities. While Ashenden's book provides a lively and engaging account of Aboriginal affairs and history, it also highlights the ongoing silence and lack of communication between settler Australians and First Nations people. [Extracted from the article]

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]

Over the course of the twentieth century, scholars have found diverse ways of reading 'Aboriginal Dreaming' stories as historical accounts of events in Australia's 'deep time'. This article argues that, when analysed alongside developments in Australian settler–Indigenous relations, the various readings of Aboriginal stories map onto changing views of Indigenous difference as well as the usefulness and value of Indigenous culture as a 'deep history' or heritage for the settler nation. This analysis reveals that merely engaging with Indigenous stories is not inherently decolonising. Rather, the interpretation of Aboriginal story is best done with great care and in partnership with Indigenous owners of this knowledge. [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]

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]

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]

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]

‘Cuppa tea Christians’ were Aboriginal people whose faith was supposedly only as deep as their desire for a cuppa. At the Church Missionary Society of Australia’s Angurugu mission to Anindilyakwa people in the Northern Territory, missionaries in the 1960s suspected that most ‘conversions’ were only shallow. This article examines the long association in English speakers’ minds of Aboriginal cultures with insincerity or fakery. I argue that the prevalence of Anindilyakwa ‘backsliding’ at the mission in the 1960s pushed missionaries to search for new approaches to know for sure who, if anyone, was sincerely converted. Language became the key for missionaries to speak directly to Aboriginal hearts and know the Aboriginal mind, based on an assumption that Aboriginal people were only authentic when speaking their own languages. Although missionary linguistic projects tended towards impulses to ‘colonise Indigenous consciousness’, Anindilyakwa people managed this project, as well as working out their own diverse responses to the missionaries’ gospel. This article has been peer reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The article discusses the survival of the Australian Aboriginal Anindilyakwa language known as Groote Eylandt from the 1910s through the early 2010s. An overview of Anindilyakwa people's relationship with the Church Missionary Society (CMS), including in regard to the latter's efforts to have the former learn the English language, is provided.

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.