Search

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 "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]

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]

‘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]