Colonialism and Conservation

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Ecological restoration, when implemented effectively and sustainably, contributes to protecting biodiversity; improving human health and wellbeing; increasing food and water security; delivering goods, services, and economic prosperity; and supporting climate change mitigation, resilience, and adaptation. It is a solutions-based approach that engages communities, scientists, policymakers, and land managers to repair ecological damage and rebuild a healthier relationship between people and the rest of nature. When combined with conservation and sustainable use, ecological restoration is the link needed to move local, regional, and global environmental conditions from a state of continued degradation, to one of net positive improvement. The second edition of the International Principles and Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration (the Standards) presents a robust framework for restoration projects to achieve intended goals, while addressing challenges including effective design and implementation, accounting for complex ecosystem dynamics (especially in the context of climate change), and navigating trade-offs associated with land management priorities and decisions. The Standards establish eight principles that underpin ecological restoration. Principles 1 and 2 articulate important foundations that guide ecological restoration: effectively engaging a wide range of stakeholders, and fully utilizing available scientific, traditional, and local knowledge, respectively. Principles 3 and 4 summarize the central approach to ecological restoration, by highlighting ecologically appropriate reference ecosystems as the target of restoration and clarifying the imperative for restoration activities to support ecosystem recovery processes. Principle 5 underscores the use of measurable indicators to assess progress toward restoration objectives. Principle 6 lays out the mandate for ecological restoration to seek the highest attainable recovery. Tools are provided to identify the levels of recovery aspired to and to track progress. Principle 7 highlights the importance of restoration at large spatial scales for cumulative gains. Finally, ecological restoration is one of several approaches that address damage to ecosystems and Principle 8 clarifies its relationships to allied approaches on a “Restorative Continuum”. The Standards highlight the role of ecological restoration in connecting social, community, productivity, and sustainability goals. The Standards also provide recommended performance measures for restorative activities for industries, communities, and governments to consider. In addition, the Standards enhance the list of practices and actions that guide practitioners in planning, implementation, and monitoring activities. The leading practices and guidance include discussion on appropriate approaches to site assessment and identification of reference ecosystems, different restoration approaches including natural regeneration, consideration of genetic diversity under climate change, and the role of ecological restoration in global restoration initiatives. This edition also includes an expanded glossary of restoration terminology. SER and its international partners produced the Standards for adoption by communities, industries, governments, educators, and land managers to improve ecological restoration practice across all sectors and in all ecosystems, terrestrial and aquatic. The Standards support development of ecological restoration plans, contracts, consent conditions, and monitoring and auditing criteria. Generic in nature, the Standards framework can be adapted to particular ecosystems, biomes, or landscapes; individual countries; or traditional cultures. The Standards are aspirational and provide tools that are intended to improve outcomes, promote best practices, and deliver net global environmental and social benefits. As the world enters the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030), the Standards provide a blueprint for ensuring ecological restoration achieves its full potential in delivering social and environmental equity and, ultimately, economic benefits and outcomes.

"We Will Show the Country": Bringing History to Life

Basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) visit the coastal waters of Ireland annually, and while protected in Northern Ireland, they are not protected by domestic legislation in Ireland. In Ireland, basking shark conservation relies heavily on publicly reported sightings to assess population size and migration patterns. While basking shark tourism is popular in nearby Scotland, Irish tourism materials rarely feature basking sharks. In order to determine public awareness about basking sharks, public support for basking shark conservation and interest in shark tourism, 173 residents and visitors in Buncrana, Ireland were surveyed in July 2018. The results indicated that public knowledge of basking sharks is low, whilst support for basking shark conservation and interest in tourism are high. Despite the fact that conservation groups rely on publicly reported sightings as a cost‐effective research tool that is important for conservation policy, only 7% of survey respondents were aware that they could report a basking shark sighting to local research organizations (Irish Whale and Dolphin Group or Irish Basking Shark Group). Individuals who support conservation were significantly more likely to believe that others would be willing to pay to view basking sharks, indicating a link between tourism potential and support for conservation. This study showed that there may be an untapped tourism market for basking shark viewing in Donegal as well as public support for shark conservation.

The Cambridge History of Australia offers a comprehensive view of Australian history from its pre-European origins to the present day. Over two volumes, this major work of reference tells the nation's social, political and cultural story. Volume 1 examines Australia's indigenous and colonial history through to the Federation of the colonies in 1901. Volume 2 opens with the birth of the twentieth century, tracing developments in the nation through to the present day. Each volume is divided into two parts. The first part offers a chronological treatment of the period, while the second examines the period in light of key themes, such as law, religion, the economy and the environment. Both volumes feature detailed maps, chronologies and lists of further reading. This is a lively and systematic account of Australia's history, incorporating the work of more than sixty leading historians. It is the ideal work of reference for students, scholars and general readers.

About the Artist:Jasmine Togo-Brisby Katerina Teaiwa Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander with roots in Ambae and Santo, Vanuatu, and now based in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her practice is multidisciplinary, including painting, early photographic techniques, and sculpture, and her research examines the historical practice of blackbirding, a euphemism for the Pacific slave trade, in which over sixty thousand Islanders were taken to work on Australian sugarcane plantations between 1847 and 1903. This labor trade has a contemporary legacy, continuing to impact those who trace their roots to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia through the South Sea Islander and other slave diasporas. Togo-Brisby, whose great-great-grandparents were taken from a beach in Vanuatu in 1899 and put to work as house slaves for the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, is one of the few Pacific artists exploring cultural memory and shared histories of plantation colonization and displacement across the Pacific. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Nadai Wilson Ships, displacements, arrivals, and belonging are regular themes in Togo-Brisby's powerful works. She is deeply inspired by her ancestors' difficult stories and experiences, as well as by what she needs to share with her daughter, who features in her artworks. In a 2020 interview for the New Zealand Maritime Museum, titled "Unfurling Tākiri with Jasmine Togo-Brisby," she spoke on the importance of identity within a community still marginalized in mainstream Australia: "What does it mean to be South Sea for me? Like, it's everything, you know. It's my culture. It's my people. It's why I exist." Jasmine Togo-Brisby is the first artist of Australian South Sea Islander heritage to be featured in The Contemporary Pacific, and we hope that awareness and inclusion of Australian South Sea Islanders as an integral part of Australian and Pacific histories and families will continue to gain attention and establish the recognition and justice these communities deserve. [End Page vii] Click for larger view View full resolution Bitter Sweet, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2015. Unrefined sugar and resin, dimensions variable; installation 2,000 x 2,000 x 1,200 mm. Photo by Shaun Waugh. Racial segregation was heavily enforced in Australia throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Respectful burial of non-white people within cemeteries was often difficult to facilitate, and many plantation owners opted to dig large burial pits on the outskirts of their plantations. Today, mass unmarked graves of South Sea Islanders remain scattered across plantations throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales. Often dug up by accident, each discovery reopens wounds from a past that most Australians would rather forget. This work exists as a memorial to those who did not survive the journey on slave ships, to those who passed away through lack of immunity to Western diseases, and to those who endured the toil and burden of hard labor only to be left out of Australian history books. [End Page viii] Click for larger view View full resolution Into Something Else, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2021. Crow feathers and mixed media, diameter 2,500 mm. Photo by Bo Wong. South Sea Islander erasure was initially pathed through mass deportations (the largest in Australian history), and those remaining were forced by governmental structures to identify their South Sea bodies as Indigenous Australian, a terrain of "Blak" political struggle that continues to reinforce South Sea placelessness today. Into Something Else interrogates this spatial dilemma and acts as a physical manifestation of the Pacific slave diaspora—exploring the complexities of contemporary South Sea Islander identity. The black crow is often claimed by our South Sea community and used in unity as a symbol of the blackbirding trade and of our collective memory and cultural identity. My practice takes shape using reoccurring motifs, and in this piece, I claim crow products as my own South Sea material culture. The installation moves both backward and forward in time, refusing to sit in either the past or the future, while offering itself as a site of South Sea possibility. [End Page ix] Click for larger view View full resolution Post-Plantation, by...

Evolving restoration principles in a changing world

Tackling climate change and biodiversity loss are two of the great global challenges of the 21st century. The nature-based solutions (NbS) approach creates an opportunity to meet efforts on the two agendas while producing other co-benefits beyond climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. This opportunity becomes even more relevant in areas with both high climate vulnerability and special interest for conservation. Coastal wetlands in the Mediterranean basin are under severe threat from urban sprawl, mass tourism and climate change. Coastal lagoons, dune systems and halophilic ecosystems are considered as priority habitats of community interest for conservation by the European Habitats Directive. In the Catalan coast, these ecosystems are fragmented and isolated, and ecological protection and restoration efforts are essential. In this context, the present work analyzes the case of de-urbanization and ecological restoration of La Pletera salt marsh by the Life Pletera project (2014–2018), interpreting it within an NbS approach and assessing its effectiveness as a strategy for climate adaptation and biodiversity conservation. The analysis brings insights for the effectiveness assessment of the project during the first years after implementation, gathers elements on the factors and constraints that made its implementation possible and reflects on future challenges so that its effectiveness is lasting in the medium and long term.

In 2005, Australia’s public broadcasters each produced ‘reality history’ programs: The Colony, which screened on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in January, 1 and Outback House, produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in mid-year. Australian audiences had previously enjoyed British and American ‘reality history’ programs like Frontier House and 1940s House, and the local versions proved popular: The Colony drew SBS’s largest audiences for an Australian-made program since 2001, and Outback House attracted audiences of around 1 million per episode (Australia’s population is around 21 million). 2 Both The Colony and Outback House promised that participants and viewers would “step back in time” to different periods of Australia’s colonial history, a history that has been bitterly debated in the public domain in Australia’s “history wars”. 3 These debates have centred on conflicting interpretations of Indigenous-European history and the violence of colonisation, and have been fought not just between academics, but also politicians and neo-conservative newspaper commentators. The history wars form part of the cultural backdrop to these programs, alongside the success of the reality TV genre, which has cultivated knowing and critical audiences familiar with its constructions and artificialities. Both these factors influenced the public reception of the programs, coupled with debates over the ways Australian history is taught in schools (Clark 2006), and the preponderance of British and American history documentaries on our television screens (Arrow 2005).

We ask you now, reader, to put your mind, as a citizen of the Australian Commonwealth, to the facts presented in these pages. We ask you to study the problem, in the way that we present the case, from the Aborigines’ point of view. We do not ask for your charity; we do not ask you to study us as scientific-freaks. Above all, we do not ask for your “protection”. No, thanks! We have had 150 years of that! We ask only for justice, decency, and fair play. (Patten and Ferguson 3-4) Jack Patten and William Ferguson’s above declaration on “Plain Speaking” in Aborigines Claim Citizenship Rights! A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association (1938), outlining Aboriginal Australians view of colonisation and the call for Aboriginal self-determinacy, will be my guiding framework in writing this paper. I ask you to study the problem, as it is presented, from the viewpoint of an Indigenous woman who seeks to understand how “sorry” has been uttered in political domains as a word divorced from the moral freight attached to a history of “degrading, humiliating and exterminating” Aboriginal Australians (Patten and Ferguson 11). I wish to argue that the Opposition leader’s utterance of “sorry” in his 13 February 2008 “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” was an indicator of the insidious ways in which colonisation has treated Aboriginal Australians as less than, not equal to, white Australians and to examine the ways in which this particular utterance of the word “sorry” is built on longstanding colonial frameworks that position ‘the Aborigine’ as peripheral in the representation of a national identity – a national identity that, as shown by the transcript of the apology, continues to romanticise settler values and ignore Indigenous rights. Nelson’s address tries to disassociate the word “sorry” from any moral attachment. The basis of his address is on constructing a national identity where all injustices are equal. In offering this apology, let us not create one injustice in our attempts to address another. (Nelson) All sorrys are equal, but some are more equal than others. Listening to Nelson’s address, words resembling those of Orwell’s ran through my head. The word “sorry” in relation to Indigenous Australians has taken on cultural, political, educational and economic proportions. The previous government’s refusal to utter the word was attached to the ways in which formations of rhetorically self-sufficient arguments of practicality, equality and justice “functioned to sustain and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia” (Augoustinos, LeCouteur and Soyland 105). How then, I wondered as I nervously waited for Nelson to begin apologising, would he transform this inherited collective discursive practice of legitimised racism that upheld mainstream Australia’s social reality? The need for an apology, and the history of political refusal to give it, is not a simple classification of one event, one moment in history. The ‘act’ of removing children is not a singular, one-off event. The need to do, the justification and rationalisation of the doing and what that means now, the having done, as well as the impact on those that were left behind, those that were taken, those that were born after, are all bound up in this particular “sorry”. Given that reluctance of the previous government to admit injustices were done and still exist, this utterance of the word “sorry” from the leader of the opposition precariously sat between freely offering it and reluctantly giving it. The above quote from Nelson, and its central concern of not performing any injustice towards mainstream Australia (“let us not” [my italics]) very definitely defines this sorry in relation to one particular injustice (the removing of Indigenous children) which therefore ignores the surrounding and complicit colonialist and racist attitudes, policies and practices that both institutionalised and perpetuated racism against Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This comment also clearly articulates the opposition’s concern that mainstream Australia not be offended by this act of offering the word “sorry”. Nelson’s address and the ways that it constructs what this “sorry” is for, what it isn’t for, and who it is for, continues to uphold and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. From the very start of Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament”, two specific clarifications were emphasised: the “sorry” was directed at a limited time period in history; and that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Nelson defines this distinction: “two cultures; one ancient, proud and celebrating its deep bond with this land for some 50,000 years. The other, no less proud, arrived here with little more than visionary hope deeply rooted in gritty determination to build an Australian nation.” This cultural division maintains colonising discourses that define and label, legitimate and exclude groups and communities. It draws from the binary oppositions of self and other, white and black, civilised and primitive. It maintains a divide between the two predominant ideas of history that this country struggles with and it silences those in that space in between, ignoring for example, the effects of colonisation and miscegenation in blurring the lines between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’. Although acknowledging that Indigenous Australians inhabited this land for a good few thousand decades before the proud, gritty, determined visionaries of a couple of hundred years ago, the “sorry” that is to be uttered is only in relation to “the first seven decades of the 20th century”. Nelson establishes from the outset that any forthcoming apology, on behalf of “us” – read as non-Indigenous Anglo-Australians – in reference to ‘them’ – “those Aboriginal people forcibly removed” – is only valid for the “period within which these events occurred [which] was one that defined and shaped Australia”. My reading of this sectioning of a period in Australia’s history is that while recognising that certain colonising actions were unjust, specifically in this instance the removal of Indigenous children, this period of time is also seen as influential and significant to the growth of the country. What this does is to allow the important colonial enterprise to subsume the unjust actions by the colonisers by other important colonial actions. Explicit in Nelson’s address is that this particular time frame saw the nation of Australia reach the heights of achievements and is a triumphant period – an approach which extends beyond taking the highs with the lows, and the good with the bad, towards overshadowing any minor ‘unfortunate’ mistakes that might have been made, ‘occasionally’, along the way. Throughout the address, there are continual reminders to the listeners that the “us” should not be placed at a disadvantage in the act of saying “sorry”: to do so would be to create injustice, whereas this “sorry” is strictly about attempting to “address another”. By sectioning off a specific period in the history of colonised Australia, the assumption is that all that happened before 1910 and all that happened after 1970 are “sorry” free. This not only ignores the lead up to the official policy of removal, how it was sanctioned and the aftermath of removal as outlined in The Bringing Them Home Report (1997); it also prevents Indigenous concepts of time from playing a legitimate and recognised role in the construct of both history and society. Aboriginal time is cyclical and moves around important events: those events that are most significant to an individual are held closer than those that are insignificant or mundane. Aleksendar Janca and Clothilde Bullen state that “time is perceived in relation to the socially sanctioned importance of events and is most often identified by stages in life or historic relevance of events” (41). The speech attempts to distinguish between moments and acts in history: firmly placing the act of removing children in a past society and as only one act of injustice amongst many acts of triumph. “Our generation does not own these actions, nor should it feel guilt for what was done in many, but not all cases, with the best of intentions” (Nelson). What was done is still being felt by Indigenous Australians today. And by differentiating between those that committed these actions and “our generation”, the address relies on a linear idea of time, to distance any wrongdoing from present day white Australians. What I struggle with here is that those wrongdoings continue to be felt according to Indigenous concepts of time and therefore these acts are not in a far away past but very much felt in the present. The need to not own these actions further entrenches the idea of separateness between Indigenous Australia and non-Indigenous Australia. The fear of being guilty or at blame evokes notions of wrong and right and this address is at pains not to do that – not to lay blame or evoke shame. Nelson’s address is relying on a national identity that has historically silenced and marginalised Indigenous Australians. If there is no blame to be accepted, if there is no attached shame to be acknowledged (“great pride, but occasionally shame” (Nelson)) and dealt with, then national identity is implicitly one of “discovery”, peaceful settlement and progress. Where are the Aboriginal perspectives of history in this idea of a national identity – then and now? And does this mean that colonialism happened and is now over? State and territory actions upon, against and in exclusion of Indigenous Australians are not actions that can be positioned as past discriminations; they continue today and are a direct result of those that preceded them. Throughout his address, Nelson emphasises the progressiveness of “today” and how that owes its success to the “past”: “In doing so, we reach from within our

Reviewed by: Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada by Benjamin T. Jones Angela Woollacott Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada. By benjamin t. jones. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. 299 pp. $100.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper). Australian and Canadian history shared significant similarities both in politics and on their frontiers in the nineteenth century, along with important differences. While the expanding field of settler colonial history now often brings these histories into the same frame of analysis, studies that directly connect or compare them at length are not common. For this reason, Benjamin Jones’s study of the development of responsible government in the two places in the middle of the nineteenth century is to be welcomed. Republicanism and Responsible Government contributes to world history in the sense of connecting two disparate sites through this shared political evolution, though it does not seek to place these stories of political maturation in a broader global framework. Its methodology involves drawing connections more than making full-blown comparisons. Jones is as much—if not more—interested in political philosophy as in history. His focus is squarely on civic republicanism, which he defines as “a society of citizens engaging in activities to promote the body politic” and “to counter the desire for self-gain (corruption) with the desire for the greater good (virtue)” (pp. 18–19). This is a political philosophy now enjoying currency in both Spain and Switzerland, not least through the work of philosopher Philip Pettit. Jones presents a history of the ideas he sees in civic republicanism, and explains that the aim of his book is to show how the reform leaders in Canada and Australia from the 1830s through the 1850s drew on this intellectual tradition at least as much as they did from Lockean liberalism. He also puts forward the [End Page 698] concept of Christian civic republicanism, arguing that nonconformist religion was significant in shaping a shared vision of “a British Christian society dedicated to civic virtue, civic duty, and a civic religion” (p. 16). Further, Jones is at pains to argue that separatist (that is, anti-monarchical) republicanism was a minor strain in the politics of the day, and of much less import than civic republicanism. Beside the two introductory and one concluding chapters framing the book, there are four chapters on Canada and three on Australia. The Canadian chapters cover the rebellions of 1837–1838 in Upper and Lower Canada; Lord Durham’s 1838 Report on the Affairs of British North America and its significance; the role of newspaper editor Joseph Howe in pressing for responsible government in Nova Scotia; and those of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine in Upper and Lower Canada, respectively. The Australian chapters deal with the political career and significance of the Presbyterian cleric John Dunmore Lang and his role in the movement for representative and responsible government in New South Wales; the Anti-Transportation League and its campaign to stop the shipping of convicts to Australia; and the story of the Eureka Stockade on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854 and the consequent 1855 trials. I am insufficiently expert in Canadian history to assess how original those chapters are, though I found them interesting. In relation to the chapters on Australia, that on John Dunmore Lang is welcome because while his name is familiar, he has not been the subject of much historical attention in recent decades. The Anti-Transportation League has received more attention, as in the recently completed doctoral dissertation by Chris Holdridge, comparing the opposition to convict transportation in both South Africa and Australia and showing the connections among those movements, the push for colonial constitutional reform, and the emerging settler polities.20 My main reservation about Jones’s book concerns his presentation of the Eureka Stockade. He is familiar with the debate in Australian historiography surrounding Eureka, even citing some of the prominent historians who have objected to its mythological elevation in Australian history and pointing out the consequent distortions. Nevertheless, Jones contends that civic republicanism “drove the miners to take their fateful stand and resulted soon after in the...

Convicts have an iconic status in Australian history. Many modern Australians take pride in claiming descent from convict ancestors, although this was not always the case in the past. Convict ancestry provides a colourful and immediate link with the origins of white settlement in this young, settler society, and for many non-Australians, convictism is the one part of Australian colonial history with which they are familiar. The convict past that lives in popular understanding, however, is often at odds with scholarly research on the subject. There are many stereotypes of convict life that appear and reappear in popular culture. Typically, convicts were almost exclusively male and always adults. Female convicts are imagined as prostitutes, or at least sexually promiscuous. Most convicts, both male and female, were transported as a result of manifestly unjust punishment for trivial acts such as theft of food or clothing that a harsh and inequitable society forced them to commit in order to survive. Once in Australia, convicts were locked in gaols and barracks, kept in chains and flogged frequently and horrifically. They were so brutalised that they resorted to anything in order to escape, including mutiny, cannibalism and suicide.

The history of colonialism in Australia is summarised into four phases, called external colonialism, internal colonialism, welfare colonialism and dependent autonomy. Four policy frameworks for Aboriginal affairs: subjection and exploitation; protection and segregation; assimilation and integration; and self‐determination and reconciliation; coincide with these phases. Contradictions arising from irreconcilable tendencies in liberal‐humanist philosophy marked official discourses, practices and strategies during each phase of colonialism. Current policies are analysed in terms of political paradox. The self‐determination policy, which promotes autonomy through increased dependency on the state, is analysed as a new phase of colonialism which is called ‘dependent autonomy’.

Reviewed by: Foundations by Karin Speedy Heather Goodall Foundations. By Karin Speedy. Lower Hutt: Karin Speedy, 2022. This is an engaging and evocative work of creative non-fiction. Karin Speedy has cryptically described it in her cover notes as a “memoir/literary nonfiction novel.” The book depicts episodes of her life—at different ages—and intersperses them with her analyses of the situations she was researching. This is certainly memoir, but Speedy takes us further, disrupting chronological progressions with juxtaposition, shifting narrative voices and contrasting styles. This agility allows Speedy’s book to remain lucid and accessible while it draws the reader in. Foundations tells at least four stories, weaving them together so they are in conversation—sometimes disturbingly, often movingly—with each other. One story is a family history, across a number of generations of migrancy and colonialism, told through the eyes of Speedy as a young person growing up within a difficult family relationship in Auckland, Aotearoa. Beyond this troubled nuclear family, there is her far longer genealogical search across the myths and secrets which so often shroud settler family histories. Only on the final pages—and after the penultimate book manuscript had been completed—do we, and the author herself, learn a key fact which offers an answer to one of these family myths. That long family history is related to the second major narrative of this book, which is the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand—the invasion and then the theft of whenua—Māori land—through military force and the deceptive versions of the Waitangi treaty. This Aotearoa colonial history necessitates telling part of the story of British colonialism in Australia and across the Pacific, although most attention is on Aotearoa. Yet another major narrative is about the French empire, itself a fragmented story with many foci. In this book, one focus is on the colonies in the Pacific, particularly Kanaky New Caledonia where Speedy has researched, but also Tahiti. Another focus is on the colonies near the east coast of Africa—Reunion and Mauritius. A third is on the colonies in the Americas, both in Canada and in Louisiana. Most of these French colonies have Indigenous, settler and enslaved populations—with African enslaved people transferred to the Americas, the Indian Ocean and, post-emancipation, to the Pacific colonies as well—and with metropolitan France intervening in the interactions between each population in and between each colony. The second and third of these stories—the colonial history of Aotearoa to the present and the entangled histories of colonies and metropole in the French Empire—open up challenges for readers who, like me, are historians working largely within one empire. I have looked at very different colonies within the British Empire, namely Australia and India, as well as exploring the tensions between the diverse and often conflicting groups within each of those colonies. And because there are such complex situations to explore, even within any colony, it has been tempting to work only on one empire. My recent work, published as Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939–1950 (2019), forced me to gain a much better grasp of Dutch colonialism, and the bitter decolonisation of the Netherlands East Indies. I was disturbed to realise how little I had known about the Dutch Empire, despite the geographic proximity of the Netherlands East Indies to Australia; despite the conflicts, in which Australians had been involved, in South Africa between the British and the formerly Dutch settlers, known as Boers, in the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century and, finally, despite the Dutch retreat to Australia during the Japanese invasion from 1942 to 1945 and beyond. Recognising Australia’s place as a South Pacific Island—as I work on the relationships between First Nations people, including Indigenous Australians, in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific campaign—I have paid much more active attention to the French Empire. Here my knowledge has proved to be even less adequate than in relation to the Dutch colonial impact. One dimension of my failure to know more about the histories of both Dutch and French colonialism has been my monolingualism—and the false sense of confidence...

In the 1990s, Indigenous art, once the antithesis of Australian national culture, became its brand. Given the history of colonialism in Australia, it was a big story that has generated a substantial interdisciplinary scholarship on the politics of art in the contemporary world. This chapter tracks the journey of Indigenous art within the discourse of Australian national culture during the 20th century from pariah to saviour. Beginning with an analysis of the ideological and historical relationships between Indigenous art and artworld constructions of national cultures in the modern world, the main part of the chapter addresses the changing roles of Indigenous art in Australian national discourse from its foundation at the beginning of the 20th century in the dream of a white Australia within the fold of the British Empire, with a particular focus on the post-World War II period when postcolonial, multicultural and postnational agendas opened new opportunities and challenges for Indigenous art within a revised national culture.

Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$) tells the story of four young Indigenous Australian men who are accused of stealing beer and then chased by police into a marsh that has been contaminated by mining. The film subverts representations of Indigenous Australians in ethnographic film and makes visible the way these representational tools are part of the same destructive force enacted by colonial structures of power that support the mining industry.