Browsing by Subject "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History"

Tasmania became an island separate from the rest of Australia around 14 000 years ago, during the final warming phase of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. As global temperatures increased towards modern levels and sea levels rose because of the melting ice caps, Australia's shorelines changed, closing the land bridge between Tasmania and the continent, and later that between Australia and New Guinea. From that time, Tasmania's cultures developed in isolation - an extreme case, some would say, of the more general isolation of Australian cultures, though people hardly feel deprived of contact when they know nothing of anywhere beyond the connections of their daily lives. Tasmanians and those from what is now the mainland turned their backs on each other and lived without knowledge of the other for 14 000 years. Now, by virtue of the creation of a single nation through processes of colonisation and federation, the communities on each side of Bass Strait are both identified as Aborigines, as a consequence of not being non-Aboriginal people of Australia.

On 26 January 1988, Australia's Bicentenary day, I was among the 100 000 heat-stroked crowd crammed on the shores of Sydney Harbour, experiencing the majestic spectacle of the Tall Ships. For all the exhibition and excitement, it was a reflective occasion on which the 'national story' was revealed to be fractured and multifaceted. My outstanding memories, next to sunburn and claustrophobia, are of Aboriginal Protesters greeting the ships with shrill slogans and theatrical gestures. On the same day, in Kings Cross, a dear friends, who mischievously weaved among the crowds in a pyjama-style convict costume, ended the day badly when he was set upon and mildly beaten by a group of young Aboriginal men. While that incident was contrary to the mood of celebration, it was also somewhat emblematic of this politically and historically charged occasion. Of course, what is commemorated on 26 January is the arrival in 1788 of what later became known as 'the First Fleet'. Of the many turning points in our national story, the foundation event - European Australia's moment of original - seems an obvious, indeed inevitable, subject for commemoration. It is also the most ripe for interrogation, and most malleable to the disparate cultural and political sensitivities and interests of contemporary generations. By tracing the remembrance of the moment over time and across generations, we can chart some of the changing and conflicting ideas of Australian identity. In the case of the arrival of the First Fleet and the foundation of the European Australia, the moment is forever flavoured by certain characteristics and circumstances embedded in the event which have proved awkward to later generation of Australians. January 26 1788 is a crucial moment in Australian history both because of what happened and how it has been remembered.

In a provocative reappraisal of the 1960s, 'Aborigines & Activism' recontextualises the history of Aboriginal activism within wider international movements. Concurrent to anti-war protests, women's movements, burgeoning civil rights activism in the United States and the struggles of South Africa's anti-apartheid freedom fighters, dramatic political changes took place in 'assimilated' Australia that challenged its status quo. From the early days of grassroots resistance through to Charles Perkins' 1965 Freedom Ride, the 1967 Referendum, Canberra's Tent Embassy and beyond, this is the story of the Great Southern Land's racial awakening - a time when Aborigines and their white supporters achieved paradigmatic shifts in the search for equality, justice and human dignity that still has powerful implications for 21st century Australia.

The rock art of the Mount Borradaile region in the Top End of Australia's Northern territory records an estimated 55,000 years of human habitation. 'Ancient Ochres' catalogues and describes many examples of the rock paintings of the Borradaile region, illustrating the variety and diversity of painting styles and relating the nature and significance of the paintings to the local environmental and cultural history of the region.

Archaeological experimental studies have been conducted on taphonomic and artefact disturbances worldwide. Studies conducted have addressed various disturbance factors such as wind, water, animal activity, and human impact independently of one another. Generally, these studies were on a small scale with regard to the geographic range and environmental contexts covered. Additionally, no mitigation or site extent analyses have been conducted that would facilitate the management of moving and missing artefacts. The experiment was spread out over five locations in the New England Tablelands in NSW. These locations were at Barley Fields, Uralla, Kirby Farm and the University of New England Deer Park Armidale, Big Llangothlin, Llangothlin and Laura Creek west of Guyra. All locations experienced varying degrees of disturbance due to livestock, kangaroos, deer, rabbits, different slope gradient, soil, vegetation and human activity. Movement, breakage, and disappearance were common artefact disturbances in the New England Tablelands within a short six month period. Artefacts that were nor moved or moved up to seven metres experienced some breakage in less than a month, some artefacts had disappeared and some of these reappeared because of animal or human activity and environmental changes. One focus of the study was to investigate the effects of slopes on artefact movements over time. The degree of slope gradient was found not to be as significant to artefact movement as previously thought; rather, movement was due mostly to other post-depositional processes, which are discussed in this thesis. Archaeologists need to consider the potential post-depositional disturbances when determining the extremities of a stone artefact scatter. From a cultural resource management perspective it is more likely that sites recorded without these considerations may be more difficult to locate when the site is revisited for construction.

'Australia's Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era', by Babette Smith, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 408 pp., $49.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781741146042. 'A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal', by Babette Smith, 2nd ed., Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 328 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN 9781741755510. 'Voices from Tocal: Convict Life on a Rural Estate', by Brian Walsh, Tocal, C.B. Alexander Foundation, 2008, 144 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780731306107. 'Closing Hell's Gates: The Death of a Convict Station', by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 324 pp., $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781741751499. 'Tour to Hell: Convict Australia's Great Escape Myths', by David Levell, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2008, 296 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780702236860. ... If convict history is Australia's 'beloved burden', as Marian Quarterly claims, then in the early years of the new millennium there were relatively few historians willing to share the load. It is now twenty years since Robert Hughes rummaged through the closet of Australia's penal past and paraded its contents before an international audience; twenty years, too, since we were invigorated by the assertive revisionism of the 'Convict Workers' project and the Bicentenary's official ambivalence towards the criminal component of our national story. While these developments briefly re-energised interest in convict history, they also appeared to have exhausted it for a time. Admittedly, some wonderful work arose out of postgraduate research in the years after 2001, and a miscellany was sprinkled through peer-reviewed journals. But otherwise it seemed that the topic had fallen from favour, as if there was little more to be gained from interrogating the most distant chapter of our national story. As an anonymous assessor indelicately noted on my grant application a few years ago, 'surely there can be nothing left to say about convict history'. It was therefore most welcome to see 2008 bring a flurry of new scholarship, with several excellent works exploring the rich and instructive world of Australia's reluctant pioneers.

Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was often the scene of conflict, as Europeans seized the land and its resources, and its original owners fought back. The extent of conflict and the degree of violence are matters of much controversy.This book, based on a forum held at the National Museum of Australia, presents a series of essays by leading contributors to the debate. The different historical and political perspectives make a major contribution to the study of cross-cultural relations in Australia's past and provide valuable background for anyone who wishes to understand relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians today.

I am sure that most academics approaching retirement look forward to the opportunity of working in a leisurely way on some projects that appeal strongly to them, but for which they have never had time. I was no exception, and as 1985 approached and with it my departure from the German Department of the University of Queensland I had several projects that I hoped would give me something to do without the horror of deadlines.

The Anglican Church Missionary Society's Wellington Valley mission (1832–43) was one of the most ambitious and important religious experiments attempted in early nineteenth-century Australia. Located on the very western fringe of the British colony of New South Wales, amid the remains of an abandoned convict settlement, the mission provided the setting for competing assertions of status, authority and morality, played out in complex interactions between evangelists, Aborigines and British settlers/servants. This article explores those interactions through a particular focus on the built environment of the mission station. To contribute to our understanding of how the grand ideologies of evangelical Christianity played out and faltered on a local level, I argue that the material facilities occupied by the mission reflected and exaggerated many of the shortcomings and conundrums of the missionary agenda, and that infrastructural and spatial difficulties contributed markedly to its failure.

Francis Adams's poetry and fiction rarely merit more than passingreference in surveys of Australian literature of the 1880s and 1890s. His plays (five of which were gathered in his 1887 Poetical Works) and the later unactable, Elizabeth-inflected clunker, Tiberius, are nowhere mentioned in recent overviews of the literature of the period. The silence with regard to Tiberius is explicable. Australian literary critics have perhaps passed it over on the grounds that it represents Adams's late effort to strike out as a writer of a work that shifts the setting from topical surroundings to a remoter past where matters of contemporaryurgency might be shown to have had some analogies. Either that or thecritics have been unaware of the play's existence.Interest in Adams in the past half-century has tended to focus onwhat the editors of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature have called 'the impact of his intellectual modernity and revolutionary zeal'⁴ rather than his literary productions. For the most part, Adams has been coopted by literary nationalists and labour historians, though Vance Palmer, Russel Ward, G.A. Wilkes and others have recruited Adams's poetry and non-fiction to the manufacture of myths of late nineteenth century radical nationalism. Adams's writings on the 'type' of the bushman, as harbinger of the coming white Australian, provide a deal of fodder for such purposes.

The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partnership with Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation, which was aimed at understanding Aboriginal place knowledges, we develop the concept of conversation for analysing the research process between archaeology and oral history. We define co-opting conversations as the most usual conversations engaged in between disciplines, research paradigms and between scientific and Indigenous knowledges. We then identify several more productive kinds of conversation that occurred between oral history and archaeology in our research: intersecting, parallel, complementary and contradictory. We found contradictory conversations, usually regarded as failures by other researchers, yielded the most productive analytic understandings. As a result of these different types of conversations we were able to produce a richer understanding of "placeness" ('sensu' Mayne and Lawrence 1998). The richest understandings of place at Yarrawarra develop only through such interdisciplinary conversations.

Australian settler capitalism emerged under the tutelage of the British state, which permitted the blending of public interest and private property, within an imperial geopolitical and capitalist dynamic, in the early nineteenth century. The landmass of Australia was more or less 'cleared' over time of impediments to extractive, land-extensive, capitalist pastoralism and agriculture and the Aboriginal inhabitants were marginalised and decimated. The greatest barrier, however, to unfettered capitalist accumulation within the settler mode of production - in Australia as elsewhere - was that of labour, as Wakefield (1929) and Marx (1996) understood. Labour was soon scarce, especially when convictism ended, and far from homogenous and those searching for suitable low-cost and preferably servile supplies roamed across the world. Meanwhile, Aboriginal Australians managed to remain as a living presence in the frontier districts, despite the ravages of disease and violence, but with negligible incorporation into capitalist relations until the late nineteenth century and then in very limited contexts. Suitable supplies of proletarianised wage labour came as immigrants.

The settlement of Australia on a continental scale was unimaginable in 1820. Yet by 1850 the continent had been transformed by Europeans and their domesticated animals, and the Australian colonies ranked, with other Anglophone settler societies, among the fastest growing economies in history. Rapid expansion in Australia was neither organic nor inevitable. It was contingent on ecological limits and global political and economic contexts, and was contested by imperial and colonial governments, by excluded settlers and, most of all, by Indigenous people.

In the 1890s, as the Australian Aboriginal population appeared to be declining, and as debates raged over how to 'save' them and find a place for them in colonial society, two men, Archibald Meston and Ernest Gribble, proposed answers to this pressing 'problem' in Queensland. Their solutions were quite different, one involving the state, the other the churches via the Australian Board of Missions, and they clashed fiercely as each tried to make their own solution work. This dissertation examines the background, the philosophy and the methods of the two men during the years from 1895 to 1905 with particular focus on the administration of Bogimbah Reserve and Mission on Fraser Island in Queensland and its impact on the Butchulla people of the Wide bay district. It will be shown that while Meston wished to segregate Aborigines as a means of preserving a certain semblance of their traditional life, Ernest Gribble, a missionary, wanted to civilise and Christianise them, and was given the opportunity to do so after Meston's state-funded experiment had allegedly failed. The tensions between the two men, and their respective treatments of the Aborigines entrusted to their care, are explored here in order to understand the differences between their approaches. Ultimately it will be shown that from the perspective of the Butchulla people who were subjected to the methods of the two men, both Meston and Gribble's vision were failures.

Weilmoringle or Wayilmarrangkalku means 'old man saltbush' in the Muruwari language. It is a remote Aboriginal community and pastoral property two-hours northeast of Bourke and it is where I grew up. This article explores my ambivalent feelings, triggered by returning there after many years away. In collecting oral histories for community/family research, I am faced with many social and ethical issues, as well as personal ones. I am learning much about the impediments to the application of oral history methods and approaches, which arise from the multiple and interchangeable roles and responsibilities of the researcher as a community person, family member, and researcher. Through 'hangin' out' at Weilmoringle, trying to learn about other people's connections and disconnections to place, I have begun my own journey of rediscovery and reconnection.

This chapter deals with an Aboriginal woman's account of the death of Robert O'Hara Burke. recorded at Cooper Creek by a visiting squatter in 1874 (see Lewis 2007). The story of the Burke and Wills disaster is well-known and will not be discussed in detail in this chapter. The key points of relevance are that expedition member Charlie Gray died during the return trip from the Gulf of Carpentaria, and Burke and Wills offiCially died from deprivation and exhaustion. On the latter point the Aboriginal woman's story suggests otherwise.

This paper encourages teacher educators to advise their students that the critical analysis of iconic artworks can engage school students' interest, promote inclusive, reflective and generally harmonious social relations, and make learning more satisfying. It also provides the opportunity to increase their own students' knowledge and understanding of their country's heritage, draw their attention to the contentious nature of historical representation, and prepare them to consider history from a variety of perspectives. One such artwork, E. Phillips Fox's Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770, is the focus of this paper. The first part of the paper presents some fundamental knowledge and understanding that pre-service teachers of Australian history require. The second considers how teachers might use the painting in school history lessons. Finally, it is argued that this method can be used to teach a wide range of topics in a variety of international contexts.

Oral traditions, especially contrasted with written history, are typically portrayed as inaccurate. Commenting on native title claims in the US, Simic (2000) made the specific claim: "As a general rule, unwritten legends that refer to events more than 1,000 years in the past contain little, if any, historical truth". So can preliterate Indigenous languages tell us anything factual about the distant past, or does the transmission of historical facts become inevitably corrupted? Changes in sea levels around the Australian coast are now well established. Marine geographers can now point to specific parts of the Australian coast and know with some confidence what the sea levels were at a particular time before the present. This paper reports on a substantial body of Australian Aboriginal stories that appear to represent genuine and unique observations of post-glacial increases in sea level, at time depths that range from about 13,400-7,500 years BP. This paper makes the case that endangered Indigenous languages can be repositories for factual knowledge across time depths far greater than previously imagined, forcing a rethink of the ways in which such traditions have been dismissed.

This is the second volume to emerge from a significant project on Indigenous participation in the Australian economy, funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant (grant number LP0775392) involving the cooperation of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University and The National Museum of Australia. 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. The conference attracted more than 30 presenters. The themes were diverse, comprising histories of economic relations, the role of camels and dingoes in Indigenous-settler relations, material culture and the economy, the economies of communities from missions and stations to fringe camps and towns, the transitions from payment-in-kind to wage economies and Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP), the issue of unpaid and stolen wages, local enterprises, and conflicts over development.

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.

'Lost in the Bush' has been an insistent theme in Australian popular story of the past, usually based on real events. There is a special poignancy about those lost forever in trackless wastes, but Australian narrative on the subject has concentrated on the innocent of the naïve, in accordance with a high Victorian sentimentality that lingered on well into the twentieth century.

The matrilineal line is a precious connection although it is sometimes disrupted and marked by absence. In this paper we explore notions of generational connections and loss among women in our families. Three women scholars from a regional university, we are interested in the agency of objects, as discussed by Eva Domanska in 2005, and their role in feminist research. In particular we consider the entanglements between matrilineal voice and objects that produce possibilities for care and nurturing across generations. Through our conversations, we discovered that our grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' stories shared threads of similarity. We tell these stories through the collective biography of poems and prose leveraged from significant objects that highlight the "generational nurturing," researched by Nye. We disclose our attempts to reconstruct and reconnect with the women of our matrilineal lines across decades. We embed new layers in our retelling of old stories to our daughters and nieces.

When the troops of the 40th and 12th Regiments stormed the stockade at Eureka in the early hours of Sunday 3 December 1854, there were, firing back at them, a motley and multicultural collection of Ballarat miners. Most were white European males, but there were among them a few men of African origin. One soldier later said he thought 'There were a good many black men' in the stockade. In the mid-nineteenth century these 'black men' were referred to by many names, but the most common racial epithet was 'men of colour' or, to distinguish them from Asians and other non-White races, 'Black Americans', 'Negroes' or 'niggers'. In Australia at least, such terms described anyone who was 'racially' African, be he from Africa, North America or the Caribbean.

The life and times of the 19th century bushranger, Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Wordsworth Ward), and his Aboriginal accomplice, Mary Ann Bugg, have long been the subject of speculation and confusion. Thunderbolt roamed across vast areas of New South Wales over seven years from 1863, eluding police, robbing travellers, stations, pubs, stores and mailmen, until his fatal capture by police at Uralla in the New England in May 1870. Mary Ann Bugg - the mother of Thunderbolt's children and for four years his 'chief lieutenant and right-hand man' is an important historical figure in her own right. She attracted strong contemporary interest, has been long remembered in history, fiction and folklore, and remains a subject of considerable historical debate. As with Thunderbolt himself, there has been dispute over key aspects of her story. As Jillian Oppenheimer noted in her 1992 biographical essay on 'Thunderbolt's Mary Ann', 'the myth and reality [have] become difficult to distinguish'. In this article we set the record straight, tracing the evolution and lineage of certain stories concerning the life and exploits of Mary Ann Bugg. Historians who lacked the technical research expertise and access to vital archival and genealogical data have generated much misinformation concerning her. With new evidence we can now test some conflicting assertions, providing clarity and certainty on a number of issues, while casting new light on aspects of her story. The principal points of contention that can now be settled are: Who was Mary Ann Bugg? Did she assist Captain Thunderbolt in his celebrated escape from Cockatoo Island? Was she the woman, 'Yellow Long', who died in the Hunter Valley in 1867? And if not, what became of her? In the process of answering these questions we reveal something of the genesis and propagation of myth and the convergence of fact and folklore in Australian history.

The islands and coasts of northern Australia are the cradle of Australian maritime history. For at least the last 300 years the region has attracted a diverse host of international seafaring visitors who encountered and related with a variety of coastal Aboriginal communities. Primarily these were Asian visitors,particularly Macassans who, from around the early to mid 1700s, sailed annually from southern Sulawesi in vast flotillas to harvest trepang (beche-de-mer) for export to China. The British first sailed the coastlines of northern Australia in the early 1800s, though long before them, there were Dutch visitors to northern Australia. The area subsequently comprises a long and unique zone of crossculturalcontact in Australia.Much has been written about these voyages, mostly from the voyager's view, though there is an expanding literature on the impact of this traffic on Aboriginal society. This article considers aspects of the region's maritime history from the perspective of the Aboriginal artists who documented their encounters in rock paintings on the ledges and caves of this region. Aboriginal association with outsiders and the consequent introduction of foreign objects and knowledge is reflected in a number of 'historical paintings' or 'contact art', depicting introduced, non-Indigenous subjects and themes, especially ships, but also firearms, tobacco, pipes, axes, houses, horses and aeroplanes. Maritime vessels are the predominant subject of that contact art, attesting to the importance of sea-faring vessels as defining symbols of the technology and culture of foreigners.

In 2006, Beverley Kingston, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales, offered the early twenty-first century her very human and wise perspectives on the white peoples' experience of their daily life in New South Wales, from the arrival of the First Fleet to the present. Later in the year she would do the same in a very personal discussion - at unusual length - with Quentin Dempster on television in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's perspectives programme, 'State Line'. Her book, published earlier, 'A History of New South Wales', is the first history of the premier state to have been issued in over a century. It is also both political and social, cultural and insightful, as to many of the events which we tend to list in somewhat perfunctory fashion. The treatment is, perhaps, much of what might have been expected from a reflective historian who has also written well about the experiences of women in work in Australia, we well as the witty and perceptive Basket, 'Bag and Trolley: A Short History of Shopping in Australia' (1994).

'Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson' Edited by NJB Plomley Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing, 1180pp, $99.00, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9775572-2-6. 'Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission' Edited by Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls Quintus Publishing, 238pp, $34.95, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9775572-5-7. Until 1966, the image of Indigenous Tasmanians given to British and European understandings of Australian colonial history was largely that provided by British armchair anthropologist Henry Ling Roth's 'The Aborigines of Tasmania', published in 1890 - or more accurately, the revised edition of 1899. This was a key moment in the translation of the Tasmanians for European and, by extension, Australian settler consumption. With his ambition towards a totalising comprehension, synthesising all that could be objectively known about Tasmanians from a multitude of previous accounts, and with his subsequent efforts to confirm his own scholarship by disproving Fanny Cochrane Smith's claims to be the Last Indigenous Tasmanian, Ling Roth set the seal on the discourse of Tasmanian extinction for generations. His text remained the standard reference on Tasmanian Aboriginals for almost seventy years - until Brian Plomley's monumental edition of the Tasmanian journals and papers of the island's Chief Protector of Aborigines in the early 1800s, George Augustus Robinson, swept it into oblivion and reopened the whole question of Tasmanian history. 'Friendly Mission' provided a belated first-hand account of Robinson's attempts at conciliation, and of the subsequent relocation of a remnant population of Tasmanian Aborigines to Flinders Island. The importance of the book is hard to over-estimate. But the cost of reproducing it must have been extremely disadvantageous, for the first edition published by the Tasmanian Historical Research Association ran to 1074 pages; and for some thirty years now it has been out of print. It is not often a reviewer has the opportunity to celebrate such a milestone event in Australian publishing.

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 wreck of the 'Stirling Castle' and its outcome is a sorry tale, a Story of a woman's amazing fortitude and the miserable death of a gallant band of British seamen. (Bill Beatty. 'The Tales of Old Australia', 1966, p. 173). Objective fact in the 'Stirling Castle' story is an elusive spirit and just as it is about to be grasped has the habit of changing its form. (Michael Alexander, 'Mrs. Frazer on the Fatal Shore', 1971. From 1976 edition, p. 97). Let us consider the woman Eliza Fraser ... whose shipwreck among the aborigines ... and ultimate rescue by a convict ... (have) been the subject of much biographical reconstruction. (Jill Ward 'Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves' 1978. p. 402). This topic should be one of particular interest to the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, not merely because the putative events associated with it occurred in the immediate Brisbane area, but from the fact that the 'events' themselves very soon became folk-history, with various conflicting interpretations, each concerned to embroider or interpret the happenings to suit seemingly dominant issues in the case.

Of all the various infections that afflicted Aboriginal people in Australia during the years of first contact with Europeans, smallpox was the most disastrous. The physical and social impacts of the disease are well known. This article considers another effect of the contagion. It is argued that a nativist movement in the form of a waganna (dance ritual) associated with the Wiradjuri spirit Baiame and his adversary Tharrawiirgal was linked to the aftermath of the disease as it was experienced at the settlement site of the Wellington Valley of New South Wales (NSW). The discovery of this movement is of considerable significance for an understanding of Aboriginal responses to colonization in southeastern Australia. It is the earliest well-attested nativist movement in Australian ethnohistory.

Despite splits, realignments and name changes, the contest for office in New South Wales has been recognisably two-sided since shortly before the Great War. Yet minor parties and Independents have stubbornly retained a foothold, alongside the major contest. Only from 1930 to 1935 did NSW elections fail to return at least one minor party candidate or Independent, though many had this status only because of preselection problems with a major party. Generally, Independents have been local notables, acceptable even without a party label because of a personal record in local government or regional affairs. They have survived, sometimes triumphed like Richard Torbay (Northern Tablelands), simply because voters have seen them as effective spokesmen for local and regional interests. Earlier Bill McCarthy held the same electorate, a difficult one for Labor, not simply because he represented Labor but also because he displayed a healthy streak of "independence" in the same cause. The appeal of this approach is by no means new, but it has recently been growing, as regions come more and more to feel neglected.

Davidson draws on geological and paleontological interpretation of Tasmania, supplemented by early accounts of European encounters to provide evidence of the geographic and linguistic isolation of Tasmania and its early inhabitants. The Tasmanians had never seen a European before 1642, and no inhabitant of Tasmania had seen anyone from outside the island since it had been cut off by rising seas 14,000 years before. He asserts that unless knowledge was retained in the oral tradition over those 14,000 years, no Tasmanian could have known that land other than Tasmania, and people other than Tasmanians even existed. Apart from a brief encounter with Cook in 1777, Tasmanian aboriginals' technology, social and economic conditions, biology and behaviour as described by Labillardière (of the French Scientific Expedition of 1791-93, under the command of Bruny d'Entrecasteaux), were uniquely the product of their circumstances, when they left behind their relatives on the mainland and the ways in which they found to survive and adjust to the various changes over the ensuing fourteen millenia.

In 1785, when he fronted the House of Commons Committee on Transportation, Sir Joseph Banks was unquestionably the person best qualified to extol the virtues of New South Wales (NSW). Banks spoke with the authority of an aristocrat and eminent scientist. He was the president of the Royal Society and, of course, one of the very few gentlemen to have actually seen the southern continent first-hand. It had been 15 years since he and Captain James Cook had led the Endeavour along the east coast of Australia, returning home with their cargo of specimens, maps and wonderful tales of a far-off world. Since then, no other Englishman had been near the place.Lord Beauchamp's Committee on Transportation was convened -- shortly after the British government legislated to resume its centuries-old practice of transporting convicted felons abroad -- to consider the best possible location for a new and unique British colony. Banks was one of numerous gentlemen lobbying the case for 'Botany Bay'. He assured the Committee that NSW was entirely amenable to the English settlement. It was fertile, well-stocked with fish and game, well-timbered and well-watered. But the bulk of the questions asked of him related to the 'inhabitants' - those of east-coast Australia in general, and of Botany Bay in particular. Was it 'much inhabited'? Were the people 'of a peace-able or hostile Disposition?' What was 'the nature of the government of which they lived', and might some site for a convict settlement 'be obtained by Cession or purchase'? Banks' responses to these questions are well-known. There were 'very few inhabitants', he said. Though they 'seemed inclined to Hostilities they did not appear at-all to be feared.' ... Ultimately, Banks was asked if he thought a contingent of colonists stepping ashore at Botany Bay might meet with any 'obstruction' serious enough to prevent a settlement being formed. 'Certainly not', he replied. '[F]rom the experience I have had of the Natives of another part of the same Coast I am inclined to believe they would speedily abandon the Country to New Comers'. 1

This volume has been put together in some haste as a working text for a Residential School at the University of New England in September concerned with 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' and Keneally's later novels. It follows on the similar weekend study course on Keneally's first five novels held here early this decade. For several of these seminars on the Modern Novel - in an ongoing series now numbering almost a score from the first one in January 1968 - folders of notes have been prepared, or books of select proceedings have been issued, notably with 'Tolkien: Cult or Culture?' (1969) and 'Gleanings from Greeneland' (1972). The present compilation falls somewhere between these two approaches. Many persons are interested in Keneally's novel on the aborigine's defiance for differing reasons - because of the local aspect of the historical events, the modern fictional recension, or the film's largely New England locations. For these persons, there has been a bias in the items selected, towards the process whereby the novel and the film have, in the last year or so, created their own legend, as well as a remarkable momentum both within Australia and overseas. Some attempt has thus been made to indicate, through various documents, the stages whereby this has occurred.

This paper is a part of an ongoing research project I have been involved with since commencing my PhD at the University of New England. My interest in the documentation of oral histories, in particular my own community of Weilmoringle, has been the main focus of my concerns since becoming an early career academic in 2004. Although I left my community several years ago, I continue to hold a strong (and in some ways complex) connection to my traditional country and the people who come from there. Most of the participants I refer to in this paper are Aboriginal members of the community, although I hope to involve non-Aboriginal people from Weilmoringle in the future. I began recording the stories of members of my community in Weilmoringle in 2005. For the purposes of this paper, the community is both the research participant and the main intended audience for my research, and the core research method and source is oral history. My reason for conducting oral histories is that I believe Aboriginal histories and oral histories are intrinsically linked and for the most part have been largely ignored, misinterpreted or deemed as 'mythical' unreliable sources of knowledge by more traditionally text-based historians. In using oral histories, I am tapping into the millennia long tradition of oral storytelling as the way that Aboriginal people's history and cultural knowledge has and continues to be conveyed. My dilemma is that I intend to convert these oral and aural experiences into print as a key way to communicate with wider audiences the memories and stories shared with me. Embedded in this conversion is the need to get the text versions of my recordings right. My research participants are speakers of Aboriginal English and it is crucial that the written versions of the oral narratives read and sound like how the participants speak. It is also crucial that the orality of the interviews and the importance of oral history both as a form of memory and as a form of history are conveyed through the words on pages. Finally, it is important that the processes involved in consulting, interviewing, recording, transcribing and presenting are ethical and transparent.

VII. Oceanic Languages Bibliography describes a listing of resources, arranged by subject, and includes sources on Etymology, Lists of Names, Sources - a) Toponymy, b) Anthroponymy, and c) Ethnonymy, Names of Languages.

This report examines the history and significance of indigenous companion animals within traditional Aboriginal society and in early Euro-Australian settlements. Working from historical photographic and anthropological records, the project constructs a visual and written record of these often-transient human-animal relationships, including cockatoos who spoke in Aboriginal language; companion brolgas; and the traditions of raising the young of cassowary, emu, and dingo. It explores different pathways towards shared human and nonhuman animal spaces and how they found common ground outside of a contemporary model of domestication.

Against the 'silence' or 'forgetfulness' of the many massacres of Aboriginal people, the Myall Creek Massacre holds a special place due to its detailed presence in the public record. Rather than simply reasserting the truth of the many massacres, this article then records an attempt to move beyond such denials/assertion. Recording testimony to the spirit of the land, the site of Myall Creek becomes significant for both memorial and for memory.

Methodists asserted themselves as an influential force in the religion, politics and economics of empire. Their role and contribution in the global expansion of the British world reflected a strong sense of duty, and of opportunity, sustained by a conviction that they were participants in a great quest to populate the globe with liberal and moral citizens, and which would also bring non-British populations into the enlightening sphere of British influence. Undoubtedly, Methodists were particularly sensitive to those respects in which the imperial project seemed morally compromised by its aggressive and often ungodly materialism. Certainly this was the case with respect to the most serious and discreditable aspect of British imperialism - the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous societies, both in Australia, where missionising was bound closely with imperialism, and in the Pacific, where Methodist mission work often predated the arrival of colonial powers until as late as the 1870s.