Browsing by Subject "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Studies"

While name, person, thing, land, and history might all seem discrete concepts to the modern mind, they are not so separated in the dynamic imaginative consciousness of the Aborigines of Australia - or Kooris, as in more recent times the native people have come to prefer themselves to be called. Thus notions of onomastics embracing the separate realms of anthroponyms and toponyms are not valid for a people who have totally integrated in micro-sociology their vital beliefs about the universe and their relationships with places, animals, plants and other peoples. For the 'Dreaming' an underlying power-filled ground of reality and its manifestation in land and nature constitute the foundations of all traditional Aboriginal thought and of the unexpected yet irresistible cultural renaissance which since the 1970s has revitalised the indigenous peoples of the continent. The 'traditional' (past-present) is also the true History of people and place because it was in that always-to-be-remembered time out of time that the Ancestral Beings moved about, shaping what was nothing into something, forming the landscape and creating the plants, animals and people of the known world. All were related to each other through interactions that had taken place in the dreaming. Laws made then were passed on to man and have moved through the generations. All the universe was in a harmony between the physical and the spiritual.

We grow up immersed in our own culture, our own experiences and our own language. Through these we construct our understandings of the world (Billett, 1996). Once we have established our models, we are more likely to interpret what we see and experience through this lens (Gelman, 1997). In developmental psychology, this is labelled assimilation (Piaget, 1950): an understanding of the world, which comes about through the addition of information to existing schema. When we experience new events that do not neatly fit our existing schema we find these difficult to interpret and assimilate and therefore feel discomfort (Roberts & Smith, 1999). Our usual response is to try and alleviate the discomfort through reframing the information to make it fit existing schema (Feldman, 1995). When we are sufficiently motivated, we change our models of the world. However, often we are likely to ignore the new information, or modify it slightly so that it does assimilate into existing schema.

In 1998 there appeared a revised second edition of Graham Seal's 'The Hidden Culture: Folklore in Australian Society'. Originally the book had been issued by the Oxford University Press in 1989, and then reprinted in 1993. Long the main and,indeed, only teaching text for its subject - despite the fact that it was not written for that specific purpose - it has now been modified in various ways in the light of its writer's views and teaching, and has also been responsive to many changes in Australian society and in its culture.

In 'Australian Folklore' no.12 (1997) there appeared the present writer's 'A Global Language but a Regional Culture', a response in some measure to the release that year in Australia of David Crystal's 'English as a global language'. Both the article and the book endeavoured to come to grips with the seemingly inevitable forward march of English to the detriment or even loss of so many other world major and minor languages. The catalytic forces causing this progress were deemed to be "historical (i.e. imperial or trade/missionary/marine) and cultural ... [arising from] political developments; access to knowledge ... the media ... international travel and [being in] the serendipitous 'right place at the right time'."

'Australian Folklore' is the journal of the Australian Folklore Association, Inc. It is published yearly in the Southern Hemisphere Spring, i.e. in August/September. Prices and details of back issues available are listed inside the back cover. 'Australian Folklore' is a peer-reviewed journal, maintaining its high quality through the engagement of Australian research with the global research community. It has long been listed by the Modern Language Association, and many papers from it cited in the MLA's selective Annual Bibliography and indices. A similar treatment is accorded by the Modern Humanities Research Association in its ABELL, both in its Traditional Culture and other appropriate sections. In Australia, it is an ERA-listed journal.

This annual volume from the Australian Folklore Association is a sequel both to that body's earlier publications and to the Proceedings of the earlier Conferences (issued under various auspices and in differing formats). Its style and contents have, alike, been shaped in response to the various developing strands observable in folkloristics both in Australia and overseas.It is thus concerned to reflect something of the mood of general appraisal which has been felt in the field recently, particularly in Britain. Attention has also been paid to the various surveys that have been felt appropriate here in Australia as Federation approaches, and as we reflect on the fact that, in 2001, this country will host for the first time in its forty year history the prestigious World Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

This present journal can be said to have many more contributors than any of its predecessors. This is the result of a deliberate policy of involving numerous persons, both collectors and analysers, in the task of recording and publishing materials from this vast and largely neglected field of Australian narrative, custom, lexis and behaviour pattern. Thus lore, folk speech, nicknames, multicultural activity and certain religious observances all find their place in this issue. The number of notes and comments, like that of the book reviews, also shows an increase.

Because of the elementary state of comparative philology and dialectology for the Australian aboriginal languages, there has not as yet been any considerable study of roots and root residuums. The following account of one such set of concepts is offered as a study of the interaction of etymology and folklore, since each throws light on the other. The words in question are those for 'bear' and 'water' in the languages of Victoria and the North Coast of New South Wales. One cannot but be struck with the vast amount of curious legendary lore which is bound up in Australian native words. The root itself, the expression of a general and material concept, may have a residuum of folklore adhering to it in the legends of one tribe. It is tempting to feel that the word and the allied concepts may have been adopted into other dialects by the agency of intermediate neighbouring tribes.

'Bunyip': This is the name, taken from Aboriginal Wergaia dialect of the Wembawemba of western Victoria, of a fabulous large, black, amphibious monster supposed to inhabit waterways in various inland locations, especially in lakes, swamps, pools and rivers in south-eastern mainland Australia and Tasmania. Its lore has been further coloured by two forces: Irish memories of the 'poukha' (a similar threatening and mysterious night monster) and, at least in the earlier nineteenth century, natural scientists like G. F. Angas comparing it to the much larger Maori 'Tanniwha' of New Zealand, which was capable of devouring 'men, women, children and all weapons of war'.

Accommodating the diverse childcare needs of Australia's Indigenous communities, both within mainstream and Indigenous-operated services, is a major concern for all Indigenous families and communities. Of particular concern in relation to formal child care is the need for programs to be culturally strong. Culturally strong programs incorporate the culturally based beliefs, values and practices, including child-rearing practices, of individuals, families and communities using that service. This paper, drawing upon a broad-based consultation funded by the Australian Government and conducted throughout 2005–06, addresses the key elements of what constitutes culturally strong childcare programs for Indigenous children, families and communities. In recognition of the heterogeneous nature of Indigenous Australians, the research methods included focus groups, community consultations, and interviews with key stakeholders in the childcare sector nationally in order to identify their positions. The research findings highlighted that those involved with childcare programs for Indigenous children, whether they are living in a remote community in the Northern Territory or in Redfern in Sydney, New South Wales, share a similar desire: that programs reflect the cultural knowledge and practices of their respective communities.

This issue, one somewhat delayed, is, by its contents and thought, a living proof of the increasing dynamic of the discipline of folklore - and of the greater understanding of all folkloric matters, in this country, even as it is also a defiance of the now so fashionable MOOCS (multiple online on line courses, and their bland and yet often sweeping conclusions) as exist on this same field. And it indicates also the need for the general reader to realize, and to reflect deeply, on the mass of significant, but abrasive and temperamentally destructive issues that come under this rubric, and that are filling to overflow our once more traditional daily lives. Accordingly, we have taken the perhaps quaint step of indexing our journal's pages into the divisions of Names (personal and place), and then of Subjects / Themes as they are to be found in the articles in this issue. In a very real sense, too, we have made the decision to expand, even more assertively, the area of our field, it now to consider general and proximate fields of study, as highly significant areas for our research, analysis, and scholarly reporting and interpreting. Thus we have continued with our very natural existing interest in Indonesia and so in its religious / mental climate, and the forms of extremism that have so tragically occurred.

As was requested by Bill Wan nan in correspondence, an attempt has also been made to include certain controversial materials which are now placed at the front of the journal. Otherwise the main sequence of articles is roughly chronological. As in issue No. 7, relevant new poetry from (folk) writers is included, not least because of its emphasis on memory, place and on earlier experience which has often been transmitted orally. It will be obvious that some of the other contents owe their inclusion to discussion at the Fifth National conference (1992) and one piece to the Fourth (1990). Yet others have been sparked off by the contents of Australian Folklore 7 (1992). Pleasingly there is now included material in the areas of contemporary legend, oral history, and children's lore, as well as a number of 'Anglo-Celtic' items, - the last being particularly appropriate in view of the present dynamic scholarship worldwide on the Celtic diaspora. And Joan MacDonald's paper would certainly complement the Scottish sections of Hilda Ellis Davidson (ed.) 'The Seer in Celtic and Other Traditions', Edinburgh (1989).

"A folk museum is concerned with the daily life and work of people in past ages. For instance, Experiment Farm Cottage at Parramatta, NSW, is intended to catch the atmosphere of a well-to-do gentleman's home in colonial days, and the Museum of Education at Armidale, NSW, recreates a classroom of the last century to show the conditions in which children were then taught." These words come from the authoritative article on Folk Museums in Australia, published posthumously as a perspective on a remarkable and by then national movement for which the writer, Eric Dunlop, could have claimed considerable personal credit. Styling such displays, usually in historic and appropriate buildings, as 'more-specialised' than usual museums, Dunlop then argued that 'more comprehensive folk museums aim at a wider overall view of lifestyle, work, hobbies and pastimes, continuing: "The display must attempt seriously to answer such questions, either by realistic recreation of period rooms and buildings or by orderly arrangement of material in sections displaying various aspects of the past."

The grief following a suicide death has long been considered different to other forms of bereavement. One key feature of this difference is stigma which, in many societies and cultures, can leave the suicide bereaved isolated and disconnected from their community. Previous research examining the experiences of the suicide bereaved report feelings of being silenced-left both without a voice to articulate grief and without an audience to hear their stories. Facebook has occupied a somewhat dichotomous role within suicide research. Initially such social media was viewed with uncertainty, particularly as it remains difficult to ensure the safety of vulnerable people who disclose suicidal feelings in such open fora. This may be exacerbated by the fact that a person's number of Facebook 'friends' may advertise popularity but may not be indicative of their true connectedness to individuals or a community. However, the positive role Facebook can play in giving the suicide bereaved a voice in their grief-allowing them to tell their story-has been little examined. In remote communities, where access to traditional modes of help seeking can be limited by distance and lack of services, Facebook can be used positively to not only remain connected to others but also access information on services which can provide professional counselling and support. A case study in a remote Australian Aboriginal community demonstrates the ways in which Facebook has provided an accessible and valuable tool for an individual recently bereaved by suicide. By analysing the trajectory of the language used over time, and the way the story of grief was told, it can be seen that the use of Facebook facilitated healing and (re)connection to the community. This discourse opens up new ideas to the ways in which Facebook and other social media may be employed to better assist those experiencing grief, identify vulnerabilities and ensure greater connection to services at appropriate times for those who require them.

Aboriginal secret-sacred myths and legends do not fall into the category of folk tales. Such narratives occupy a place in traditional Aboriginal cultures roughly comparable to that of the gospels in Christian cultures, or the holy books of other religions. To describe them as 'folklore', that is as essentially informal and unofficial expressions and practices, is therefore both inaccurate and, given the connotations of triviality and untruth that the term 'folklore' sometimes (inaccurately) has, potentially demeaning. There are, however, some aspects of Aboriginal narrative tradition that can be described as folklore, usually those elements where there has been some interaction with the traditions of recently arrived groups. The stories of the water-dwelling monster known to English-language folklore as the 'bunyip' (q.v.) is one example of this process. The process also operates in the opposite direction, with Aborigines adopting and adapting elements of non-Aboriginal culture to produce various new amalgams, particularly in music and art.

The following poem and notes on the Old Jail at Dubbo were alike selected by L.J. Anderson, Honorary Secretary of the Gilgandra Museum and Historical Society. He is also responsible for arranging for the photograph of the Mawbey grave to be taken. There has been considerable interest in the Breelong murders and their even more tragic sequel, particularly since the more recent treatments of the theme by the late Frank Clune and by the novelist, Thomas Keneally, The matter which was also made a focus in 'The North West Magazine' for 7th January, 1974, has had numerous semi-popular treatments since 1945. The whole cluster of documents and references are published together, pending an exhaustive study of a theme which has haunted both press and imaginative writers as one of the most human and tragic instances of aboriginal and white settler confrontation.

Good quality Indigenous early learning and care can ameliorate the significant health, social, economic and political disadvantages experienced by Indigenous people in Australia. Acknowledgement of the importance of the early years by the Australian Government has produced strategies and programs based on early intervention and prevention. These include the Communities for Children initiative, the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy, and the National Agenda for Early Childhood. These initiatives are based upon the evidence from neuroscience of the impact of the child's environment on the developing brain and subsequent life chances.

The present volume arises out of a conference in Canberra on Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies at the National Museum of Australia on 9-10 November 2009. ... In this volume, we take up the central theme addressed by Jon Altman in his keynote address, concerning the use and significance of the hybrid economy model for the analysis of Indigenous economic participation. This concept has been widely used in the social sciences (Kraidy 2005). Altman's refinement and application of the concept to Australian Indigenous economic history, especially in remote Australia in recent times, have proven fruitful to research and policy debates (see his recent restatement in Altman 2009). In his keynote address at the conference, Altman explained that he had developed the hybrid economy model because of the inadequacy of a market/non-market dualism, which underestimates the role of the state and under-theorises the process of governmentality. He was also motivated by the history and cultures wars, which he saw as manifestations of 'the neo-liberal ascendancy'. This ascendancy emphasises, in effect, the agenda of moving Indigenous Australians further into the capitalist market economy as the only way forward. But people on the ground, rather than in Canberra, have a growing recognition of the inability of private capital to deliver development opportunities in remote Australia. These regions appear, through economic-rationalist eyes, to be essentially unproductive regions but this ignores their potential as sites of Indigenous culturally based, hybrid production activity.

The International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR), which will convene in Melbourne in two years' time for its thirteenth congress, is self described as "a Scientific society whose objectives are to develop scholarly work in the fields of folk narrative research and to stimulate contracts and the exchange of views among its members". This mission statement stresses alike the international purpose and the method of achieving it, by means of its academy-like nature, of membership by election and what were long the very personal nature of exchanges of Euro-centred views - those most easily achieved by the fact that only the 1995 conference in Mysore had been held out of Europe, and this despite its having executive members who 'represent Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America', as well as some others.

In the autumn of this year there died the Aboriginal activist, artist and writer Kevin Gilbert, who was born on the banks of the Kalara [Lachlan] River at Condobolin, New South Wales, on 10 July 1933. The youngest of the eight children of Jack Gilbert and Rachel Naden, and orphaned at seven, his early life was harshly spent 'on the receiving end of White Australia's apartheid system', segregated, and lacking any social service payments, while as a teenager he saw 'my brothers who had served in the second world war as enlisted men hunted like felons from the bar of a pub'. As he wrote trenchantly in 1988 (p.185) "I was born Black. Black and honest in a white society that spoke oh so easily of 'justice', 'democracy', 'fair go', 'Christian love', and had me and mine living in old tin sheds ... under ... treasures ... from the white man's rubbish tip." Returned from orphanages to the Wiradjuri country at the age of eleven, he picked grapes and did other seasonal work in the process of finding 'my reality, my people', when "with all the rags [and] little tucker, ours was a greater love, greater truth and being, a greater spirituality than any one of the white Christians ever possessed." (186) These seminal bonding experiences are enshrined in his 1968 drama 'The Cherry Pickers', a milestone stage text which presents with unswerving integrity the seemingly squalid yet magnificently warm lifestyle of a family of eleven.

This thesis is about family and community history and focuses on a place called Weilmoringle (Weil), a Murdi (Aboriginal) community and pastoral property in northwest NSW. Weilmoringle or Wayilmarrangkal means 'old man saltbush' in the Muruwari language and it is the place and community in which I grew up. Through the people I interviewed and the oral histories I collected the thesis explores people's connections, disconnections, stories and memories of Weil. It also provides the Murdi perspective on the history of Weil since time immemorial to the pastoral era, and its period as an affluent pastoral station from 1857 to 2006. The thesis also looks at more modern times, and the transition from traditional to contemporary housing and the imposition of western education and how pastoral skills and traditional bush knowledge are simultaneously taught to Murdi children. The thesis ends with a snapshot of present day Weil community and the dynamics between the families at the Top End and Bottom End camps.

This work is an investigation into the terms of cultural change in north central Namibia. I am primarily concerned with issues of agency in the processes which result in cultural change, and look at both historical and contemporary agents of change in order to determine who and what impacts cultural dynamism, and what implications this has for a newly independent country within a globalised world. These issues are presented through the lenses of Identity, Power and Politics and Globalisation. In this work, I posit that traditionally, Ovambo people have not been empowered in decisions regarding cultural change, which has resulted in a sense of cultural "loss". This sense exists within the context of culture being seen as strongly associated with the past – past practices, activities, traditions and customs, as well as early development theory which insisted that such things were indicative of a backward and primitive society at odds with the principles of modernisation. In order to progress, such practices were, with and without reticence, abandoned or changed. Contemporary Ovamboland, however, represents a dynamic cultural mélange of traditional and modern life, which co-exist whilst negotiating issues such as the impact of HIV/AIDS and neo-liberal style of post-independence democracy. Therefore, by investigating the cultural shortfall in traditional development theory, and using examples of different forms of cultural development, I suggest that when culture is seen as an important consideration of development, as well as supported as a field of development in its own right, cultural identity becomes clearer, and cultural futures are determined more democratically. In order to demonstrate these ideas, I am drawing from a number of case studies in which I was professionally involved, as well as through interviews conducted in the field. By presenting the differing agendas of international engagement in development work as well as different types of cultural development projects, I will highlight the complexities of development theory in practice, particularly when capital is involved, and how these relate to the wider issues of cultural preservation versus cultural change.

For over twenty-five years, Dr. Ian McIntosh, an anthropologist born in Australia but now long-based in the United States, has been a meticulous chronicler of the life and writings of David Burrumarra, M.B.E. (1917-1994), long his close friend and colleague. From 1986, they had worked together in the enclave of Elcho Island, in north-east Arnhem Land, in Australia's Northern Territory, on cultural and community projects, as well as on serious and time deep research. Already in the year of Burramurra's death, McIntosh recounted some of their contacts in a finely wrought and illuminating composition, 'The Whale and the Cross: Conversations with David Burramurra, MB.E.', (1994). Since then, he has treated us to a stream of his own ever insightful and eminently readable essays, while also returning to present further perspectives on his friend and the latter's culture that remain both fresh and perceptive, fascinating and significant, despite the passage of the years.

The socioeconomic histories of settler societies with their conquests, impacts, articulations, fusions and hybridisations are a fraught field for research, with a wide range of conceptualisations and debates, and one with significant material effects in the present. Few areas of contemporary social science history have more direct social significance. History wars, governmental Indigenous policies, socio-anthropological research and political debates are all directly affected by conceptual/scientific and ideological debates. Furthermore, the literature on settler economic history, in contrast with that of social and cultural history, has been somewhat lagging in this conceptual debate. This chapter is a discussion of the development, meaning, use and usefulness of the central but controversial concepts of 'conquest', 'hybridity' and 'production regimes' to the field of settler-Indigenous economic relations and their consequences. I argue we need all these concepts and several more and that the concept of 'hybridity' must be part of this bigger set of concepts - depending on how it is specified and used - if it is to carry the weight placed on it. In particular, it is argued here that the concept of 'hybridity' - now extensively used in cultural studies and especially post-colonial studies - is useful for this field but also potentially over-generalising and misleading in its application. The danger is, I argue, that the use of 'hybridity' could obscure as much as it illuminates if it is too generalised. Surely not all socioeconomic articulations, blendings, mergers or fusions are hybridisations. If they are then the concept loses specificity and power because of over-generalisation.

The subject of toponymy or the study of place-names has long been viewed with suspicion in Australia and consigned by serious scholars to some sort of lunatic fringe where the amateur antiquarian and etymologist have been allowed to sport themselves unchallenged. The bulk of the work to date has been occasional in appearance, uneven in scholarship and vague as to its overall aims. The reasons for this state of affairs in Australia would seem to be obvious - the subject has belonged to no recognized field and has not appealed sufficiently to any discipline ; the records are, at best, fragmentary and no general system of attack has been evolved ; the often ridiculous views of uninformed individuals have gained wide currency through the press ; no system of close analysis of the names of a given area has ever been given the correct sort of publicity. In view of the recently awakened interest in Australian place-names, it should be of interest to members of this society to see some of the methods of approach and analysis applied to names in an area with which they will already be reasonably familiar. It was noted of the subject in the British Isles that "The study of place-names may be said to stand to history and ethnology in somewhat the same relation as the study of fossils stands to geology. Each group or set of fossils represents, with more or less strictness, a distinct age of geologic time as, roughly speaking, does each group of place names represent a period of historic or prehistoric time." For Australia the statement needs modification, since Australia's early history was not recorded and before the coming of the white man the Aboriginal native knew no writing and kept no records. What history the Aboriginal names tell us is scarcely political or even tribal but rather concerned with the social life, the flora and the fauna and the prominent features of the topography. Aboriginal names in our area are a fair proportion of the whole, but where they have survived and not been replaced, in many instances there is no known interpretation of the significance. In spite of this limitation, the names do tell us something of the various matters once deemed worthy of attention and designation in the surrounding landscape.

The subject of toponomy or the study of place names has long been viewed with suspicion in Australia and consigned by serious scholars to some sort of lunatic fringe where the amateur antiquarian and etymologist have been allowed to sport themselves unchallenged. The bulk of the work done to date has been occasional in appearance, uneven in scholarship and value as to its overall aims. The reasons for this state of affairs in Australia would seem to be obvious - the subject has belonged to no recognised field and has not appealed sufficiently to any discipline; the records are, at best, fragmentary, and no general system of attack has been evolved; the often ridiculous views of uninformed individuals have gained wide currency through the press; no system of close analysis of the names of a given area has ever been given the correct sort of publicity. In view of the recently awakened interest in Australian place names, it should be of interest to members of this society to see some of the methods of approach and analysis applied to names in an area with which they will already be reasonably familiar.

The purpose of this article is to reflect on some of the work of the Pathways to Prevention Project , particularly as it has involved the local Indigenous population. A key objective is to demonstrate the inter-connectedness of the issues and challenges that Indigenous parents and children face, and hence to put the "doing" of prevention work into a rich developmental ecological and community framework. We draw on two case studies to illustrate our arguments.