Indigenous Australia Research Articles

Peter Carey’s “Homo Australiensis” in A Long Way from Home

The paper examines Peter Carey’s first book about Indigenous Australians, a topic which he had neglected for decades. Until A Long Way from Home (2017) was written, the two-time Booker Prize winner renowned for portraying Australian identity had yet to confront this crucial matter which he believed was a fundamental issue of the country. Reasons behind this seemingly contradictory and lengthy absence are highlighted along with certain methods with which the author gradually exposes Australia’s shameful past in the treatment of First Nations people. Carey’s approach stays true to his body of work, namely the Aboriginal subject is complemented or intertwined with his portrayal of another layer of Australia’s history: the pan-European heritage of non-Indigenous Australians. But why and in what manner does he integrate European topics into a novel aiming to shed light on the maltreatment and neglect of First Nations Australians? Does this addition not dilute the original aim of paying homage to Indigenous Australia? My paper argues that Carey successfully utilises certain European identity themes to help show the gravity of sins committed against Australian Indigenous people. The author’s modus operandi is to piece together seemingly neglected fragments of the European legacy with First Nations Australia to reveal a unified entity. Via Willie Bachhuber, a character who most Australians can connect or identify with, Carey joins together various Australian identities which may not have been connected beforehand. With this technique Carey helps ensure the novel is about and for all Australians. I believe that A Long Way from Home crowns Peter Carey’s career as fully depicting Australianness without including Aboriginal people has up until now meant a quite incomplete oeuvre. An ultimate Australian character so-far elusive to Carey, a Homo Australiensis has come to life via a pseudo-German-Balt-Hungarian-Australian, who is actually a First Nations Australian with a white biological father.

Compensation for cultural loss in Indigenous Australia

The issue of compensation for harm to Indigenous culture is increasingly prominent in Australian society, given the High Court's landmark decision in Northern Territory v Griffiths (2019). The High Court sought to assess the meaning of cultural loss from Indigenous testimony and ‘translate the spiritual hurt from the compensable acts into compensation’. The destruction of Juukan Gorge in Western Australia's Pilbara region in 2020 also prompted efforts to assess, evaluate and remedy the harm Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples suffered. Parallel debates about treaties have also raised the possibility of reparations for colonization. This article considers the challenges these legal and political developments pose for anthropology in Australia, where scholars have avoided discussing the concept of cultural loss for a generation.

A higher education pedagogy for settler listening with Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

This article focuses on a higher education pedagogy of reading the exemplary novel of Indigenous Australia, Carpentaria (2006) by Waanyi author, Alexis Wright. The multiply awarded and multiply translated novel gives an epic view of contemporary Aboriginal life. Its dramatization of listening relations is profoundly insightful for the current historical moment in Australian Indigenous-settler relations. Our pedagogy of settler listening emerges from the invitation by the Indigenous signatories to The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) calling on all Australians to aim for a “better future” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our pedagogy has even more relevance since the defeat of the 2023 “Voice” referendum that symbolically and practically aimed to ensure that better future through a permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body to parliament. We describe our pedagogy through the scholarship in political listening studies and the “ethics of reading” the combination of which engenders responsiveness and responsibility in a reader that is potentially (trans)formative of relationality. We argue that when higher education curriculum is attentive to pedagogies of listening relations to marginalized voices, the conditions for settler listening are being achieved both within higher education and beyond.

Reckoning with Colonial Legacies of Harm: Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission

ABSTRACT Australia’s colonial era is formally over. Yet the legacies of structural inequality, dispossession, exploitation and racism against Indigenous Australia remain alive and well. In 2021, Victoria established the Yoorrook Justice Commission, culminating in a formal truth-telling and treaty process. Seeking to address harm since colonization, the state process is unprecedented both nationally and abroad. This article considers the relevance of the commission to truth recovery, accountability and structural reform in Australia. To date, national efforts to deal with the colonial past have been piecemeal and relatively ineffective. The Yoorrook Justice Commission departs from previous single-issue inquiries as well as from reconciliation policies driven by white-Australian federal institutions. While the Commission is not a panacea for resolving colonial injustice, it provides an important means of relational and structural truth-telling towards more just relations and righting racial wrongs. Ultimately, the Yoorrook Justice Commission sets a valuable precedent for Australia and other postcolonial nations. Its level of Indigenous ownership, its authority as a Royal Commission and the breadth of its inquiry make it a significant transitional justice project.

AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database.

Message sticks are wooden objects once widely used in Indigenous Australia for facilitating important long-distance communications. Within this tradition an individual wishing to send a message would carve a stick and apply conventional symbols to its surface. The stick was entrusted to a messenger who carried the object into the territory of another community together with a memorised oral statement. Between the 1880s and the 1910s, settlers and international scholars took great interest in message sticks and this was reflected in efforts to document, collect and store them in museums worldwide. However, by this period, the practice was already undergoing profound changes, having been abandoned in many parts of the continent and transformed in others. While message sticks were still being used in a traditional way in Western Arnhem Land up until at least the late 1970s, today they feature in public interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations, in art production and in oral narrations. Accordingly many questions concerning the history, pragmatics and global significance of message stick communication remain unanswered. To address this we have compiled the Australian Message Stick Database, a new resource hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and The Australian National University, Canberra. It contains images and data for over 1500 individual message sticks sourced from museums, and supplemented with information derived from published and unpublished manuscripts, private collections, and from field recordings involving contemporary Indigenous consultants. For the first time, knowledge about Australian message sticks can be evaluated as a single set allowing scholars and Traditional Owners to explore previously intractable questions about their histories, meanings and purposes.

Economics and the dreamtime revisited: Creating a truly Australian economic history?

AbstractThe Economics and the Dreamtime was a landmark in Australian Economic History where Noel Butlin elevated awareness of the central importance of Indigenous economic history. It was a sprawling inter‐disciplinary work that used economic tools to understand Indigenous society before first contact and in the early colonial period. This article revisits that book to provide a critical evaluation of the major contributions of Butlin's research on Indigenous Australians. His primary contribution was to make Indigenous people more visible in the Australian economy in the early colonial period. He created a unique backcasting methodology that allowed Indigenous population to be estimated in the first six decades of the colony based on depopulation from disease, resource loss and frontier violence. I argue that the two main shortcomings of Butlin's research is that his method used colonial estimates of the population and that the population estimates are not sufficiently geographically differentiated. The main criticism of Butlin's research in the literature is that it is too speculative. However, his methodological innovation allows considerable transparency in the assumptions used and can create a range of plausible estimates that give us a sense of the unreliability of the existing population estimates. Alternative methodologies based on estimating population densities in 1788 from anthropological evidence are historically point estimates, which do not provide a sense of how uncertain the estimates might be. The way forward for this debate is to combine Butlin's demographic backcast methodology with population density estimates that take into account the selective mortality from disease and frontier violence. Finally, in order to create a truly Australian Economic History, it is necessary to also augment the methodology to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into the analysis and to utilise a local geography that acknowledges the diversity of Indigenous Australia.

Vortext

This article introduces the special issue of Law & Literature on “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”. The aim is to advance two imperative tasks. The first, analytic, task is to pay attention to the diversity of colonial imaginaries across the very different terrains, literatures, and epistemologies of the so-called South. Rather than continue to impose a Eurocentric canon on the domain of law and literature, the argument here is that we need to better immerse ourselves in the diversity of colonial imaginaries from places whose experiences were as different as Indigenous Australia, India under the Raj, African game reserves, or the post-conquest Americas. The second, ethical and aesthetic, task is to accept literature’s invitation not simply to document colonial, or for that matter post-colonial, ideologies, but to reimagine them. The realms of literature and art represent a crucial opportunity to talk back to power through the very modalities of fantasy and imagination, myth and story, that have been so indispensable to its maintenance. Each author in this collection wholeheartedly contributes to these two tasks, combining an analytical expansion of the past with a creative ethical engagement with the present and the future.

Evaluating the effectiveness of community health worker interventions on glycaemic control in type 2 diabetes: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundInterventions with community health workers, trained to provide basic medical education and holistic support, have been used to enhance type 2 diabetes outcomes in various settings. Evidence of their effectiveness is poor because of variations in intervention design and duration. We did a systematic review of randomised trials evaluating the effectiveness of community health worker interventions integrated into conventional care to improve glycaemic control in adults with diabetes. MethodsIn this systematic review and meta-analysis, we included randomised trials of community health worker interventions of at least-12 months’ duration in adults with type 2 diabetes that compared HbA1c levels with usual care. We searched Ovid MEDLINE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, CINAHL and the Web of Science Core Collection for studies published in English between Jan 1, 2000, and March 1, 2023, for studies containing “community health worker” or “lay health worker”, and “type 2 diabetes”. We extracted both qualitative and quantitative data to assimilate community health worker intervention characteristics. We did a meta-analysis comparing changes in HbA1c levels from baseline between intervention groups and usual care groups. To be included in the meta-analysis, studies had to have HbA1c values at baseline and after 12 months and a patient dropout rate of less than 25% at 12 months follow-up. The main outcome was the mean weighted difference of % change in HbA1c after at least 12 months, assessed using Revman, the inverse variance-weighted average model (IVW). Quality was assessed using the Cochrane Rob2 tool. FindingsSeven of 86 retrieved studies were eligible for inclusion; six studies were conducted in the USA and one study in Indigenous Australia. Participants in all studies were recruited from Latino, African American and Indigenous Australian ethnic minority groups. The meta-analysis of six studies including 1280 participants (mean age 52·6 years [SD 3·68]; 832 [65%] female and 448 [35%] male) showed a significant improvement in HbA1c level at 12 months follow-up, with a mean weighted difference of 0·5% (95% CI 0·31–0·68) in the community health worker intervention group (p<0·0001), that reached the generally accepted minimal clinically important difference (≥0·5%). Outcome heterogeneity was low. InterpretationCommunity health worker interventions showed a significant reduction in HbA1c level adjunct to usual care, but caution must be taken given the point effect estimate is only just the MCID, and the true effect could be smaller. Given the current resource constraints faced by primary care, community health worker interventions could be innovative in informing the primary and secondary management of diabetes care in UK practice. A cost-effectiveness analysis of these interventions is required before implementation in routine diabetes care can be recommended. FundingNone.

Mapping pandemic responses in urban Indigenous Australia: Reflections on systems thinking and pandemic preparedness

ObjectivesWe investigate some of the strengths and challenges associated with Covid-19 responses in urban Indigenous communities in Brisbane, Australia. Our research reflects on the interconnected dynamics that impact health outcomes and mitigate or exacerbate the risk of Covid-19 spreading within urban Indigenous communities. MethodsThree systems thinking workshops were held in 2021 with Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders (N15/workshop) from State and Federal services, along with Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations. All worked in the urban Indigenous health sector. Stakeholders produced a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) incorporating the critical feedbacks determining the dynamics influencing health outcomes. The aim of the research was to help stakeholders’ build awareness of how the structure of the system influences health outcomes. ResultsStakeholders identified 6 key dynamics which have a negative or positive impact on mitigating risks of Covid-19 infection. By mapping these dynamics within a CLD, 7 intervention points were identified. ConclusionsSystems thinking provides a useful tool in identifying the complexities associated with navigating health challenges, but further research is needed to develop frameworks that work in conjunction with Indigenous Australian methodologies. Implications for public healthIndigenous voices and communities must lie central to health responses/policies for Indigenous peoples. When systems thinking is done by or in collaboration with stakeholders it provides a visual language that can help design public health policy. What can be ascertained is that their effectiveness is predicated on systems thinking’s integration with Indigenous methodologies that acknowledges Indigenous self-determination and challenges Eurocentric representations of health and Indigeneity.

Silencing the Voice: the fossil-fuelled Atlas Network’s Campaign against Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australia

Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901 Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. A year ago, polling suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to 40%. This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas disinformation campaign against climate policy. Opposition to long-overdue constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.

Indigenous Australia's place in STEM

Indigenous Australia's place in STEM

Ancestors, Artefacts, Empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish Museums. Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent, and Howard Morphy, eds. London: British Museum Press, 2021. 256 pp. 9780714124902

GAYE SCULTHORPE, MARIA NUGENT, and HOWARD MORPHY, eds. Ancestors, Artefacts, Empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish Museums. An article from journal Archivaria (Special Issue - Toward Person-Centred Archival Theory and Praxis), on Érudit.

More than dirt: Sedimentary ancient DNA and Indigenous Australia.

The rise of sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) studies has opened new possibilities for studying past environments. This groundbreaking area of genomics uses sediments to identify organisms, even in cases where macroscopic remains no longer exist. Managing this substrate in Indigenous Australian contexts, however, requires special considerations. Sediments and soils are often considered as waste by-products during archaeological and paleontological excavations and are not typically regulated by the same ethics guidelines utilised in mainstream 'western' research paradigms. Nevertheless, the product of sedaDNA work-genetic information from past fauna, flora, microbial communities and human ancestors-is likely to be of cultural significance and value for Indigenous peoples. This article offers an opinion on the responsibilities of researchers in Australia who engage in research related to this emerging field, particularly when it involves Indigenous communities. One aspect that deserves consideration in such research is the concept of benefit sharing. Benefit sharing refers to the practice of ensuring that the benefits that arise from research are shared equitably with the communities from which the research data were derived. This practice is particularly relevant in research that involves Indigenous communities, who may have unique cultural and spiritual connections to the research material. We argue that the integration of Traditional Knowledges into sedaDNA research would add enormous value to research and its outcomes by providing genomic outputs alongside and within the rich context of multimillennia oral histories.

Book Reviews

The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation in a More-than-Human World Fiona R. Cameron. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious, eds. London: UCL Press, 2022. The Aftermaths of Participation: Outcomes and Consequences of Participatory Work with Forced Migrants in Museums. Susanne Boersma. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2023. Museum Times: Changing Histories in South Africa Leslie Witz. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Ancestors, Artefacts, Empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish Museums Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent, and Howard Morphy, eds. London and Canberra: The British Museum Press and the National Museum of Australia, 2021. The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada Heather Igloliorte and Carla Taunton, eds. New York: Routledge, 2022. Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice Julie Nagam, Megan Tamati-Quennell, and Carly Lane, eds. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2020. History Making a Difference: New Approaches from Aotearoa Katie Pickles, Lyndon Fraser, Marguerite Hill, Sarah Murray, and Greg Ryan, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

Indigenous Australia and the pre-legal society in HLA Hart’s The Concept of Law

The continuing existence and operation of the traditional law of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples has – relatively recently – been explicitly acknowledged in Australian law. In emerging case law on the subject, the High Court of Australia has confirmed the common law recognition of the survival of Indigenous Australian law. However, in determining what it is that is recognized by the common law – in interpreting Indigenous Australian ‘traditional laws and customs’ – the High Court has disregarded the knowledge reposed in those with authority or expertise in Indigenous Australian law, relying instead upon concepts and assumptions from the jurisprudence of English legal philosopher, HLA Hart. The influence of Hart’s theory in the Australian High Court’s interpretation of Indigenous Australian ‘traditional laws and customs’ is problematic, because it contains an obvious pre-legal–legal dualism reminiscent of the ‘state of nature’ – ‘civil society’ mechanism that was instrumental in the application of terra nullius to Australia. At the heart of The Concept of Law lies the notion of progression from a ‘primitive community’ with only primary rules, to an advanced legal system with a combination of both primary and secondary rules. In this article, I investigate how Indigenous Australians are positioned in relation to Hart’s pre-legal–legal dualism. I examine the ‘primitive’, pre-legal society in The Concept of Law, and its counterpart, the advanced legal system, to analyze the position of Indigenous Australian societies and law in Hart’s scheme. Finally, I analyze the construction of the dualism and consider its impact on the High Court’s interpretation of Indigenous Australian ‘traditional laws and customs’.

Yawulyu Mardukuja-patu-kurlangu: Relational Dynamics of Warlpiri Women’s Song Performance

ABSTRACT Warlpiri women, as with other groups across Indigenous Australia, sing to sustain and nurture their relationships with Country and jukurrpa (dreamings). For the custodians of these singing traditions, spiritual agency and power are consigned to songs and their singers, and performances are centred around nurturing relational links between people with Country and to other participants. Within contemporary contexts, in which Warlpiri singers are finding fewer opportunities to perform and pass on songs, new performance spaces are being created to continue to carry forward the significant cultural work of maintaining social and spiritual order through song. In this article we consider a number of performance instances of Warlpiri women's yawulyu (ceremonial songs) and discuss the inter—group dynamics and negotiations which are central to these events. We explore the ways in which Warlpiri women are continuing the cultural work of maintaining the relational aspects central to yawulyu through these performances despite shifting purposes and performance contexts. We illustrate through examples from contemporary events, how the dynamics of the particular performance instances involving ceremonial songs, dances, and other activities, direct the ways in which participants assert and reshape their intimate links to Country and to broader social networks of others.

Islam's weight in global history: A response to Sidaway.

In this commentary, we discuss three major themes that Sidaway raises in his article, 'Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies': the problem of Muslims as 'others'; the fraught role of religion as a universal category; and Muslim geographies as perceived in area studies and global history. Along these lines, we argue that Sidaway makes a number of important interventions aimed at changing the social science focus on Muslims in the West, highlighting the importance of Islamic concepts, and dislocating spaces of Islam from predefined geographical areas. After a critical discussion of the specific approaches presented in the article, we follow up on Sidaway's encouragement to think beyond the decolonial. We see this as an invitation to formulate our own vision of a new global history of Islam that takes into account traces of the influence of Muslims and of Islam more broadly speaking from Indigenous Australia to China to the Americas, and from everyday culture in Europe to extinct empires in Iberia, Sicily, and the Balkans. From this perspective, we argue, a more serious engagement with the multitude of global Islamic influences beyond Muslim communities might turn into a powerful force of decolonization.

Soundings on a Relational Epistemology: Encountering Indigenous Knowledge through Interwoven Experience

ABSTRACT Engagement with concepts of Indigenous knowledge can generate valuable conversation on what knowledge is within diverse cultures and their interactions, enriching the intellectual frameworks guiding collaborative research with Indigenous Australian communities. However, significant limitations of this term can be shown by looking to specific traditions of thought and performance within Indigenous Australia. In this article, I argue that use of the term Indigenous knowledge often carries tacit epistemological assumptions that obscure various relational and participatory dynamics of knowledge. This can be seen in tendencies to utilise the term as a marker of cultural separation rather than looking to the ways distinct traditions allow relational growth across cultural differences. I develop this critique with reference to Yolŋu manikay (public ceremonial song) as it foregrounds interactivity between different peoples and places as integral to meaningful engagement with ancestral traditions. These observations echo recent methodological work within Australian ethnomusicology, in which collaborative research activities prioritise ceremonial revitalisation and archival repatriation over ethnographic documentation. I suggest this focus might be further consolidated by emphasising characteristics such as respect, attentiveness and friendship, which can motivate collaborative research and constitute knowledge within unique localities of people and place.

Sovereignty in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006)

In a 2013 interview, Alexis Wright explained the importance for Indigenous Australians of maintaining what she called a “sovereignty of the mind, even if we haven’t got sovereignty of the country or the land.” She went on to recount the story of an Indigenous leader who advised a meeting of Aboriginal people “if you think you are a sovereign people, act like it.” In her 2006 novel Carpentaria, Wright demonstrates how these two strands of Indigenous sovereignty are evident and practiced in contemporary Australia. Key Indigenous characters in the novel are revealed to both “think” sovereign and to “act like it.” Indigenous sovereignty, which has never been ceded but is still denied by Australian law, is performed on the land, in custom, in story and in song, in a multitude of ways. Wright thereby contributes to an assertion of sovereign, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies in Australia. Significantly, cultural elders in Carpentaria are shown to take for granted their sovereign custodianship of Country regardless of who technically owns land within the colonised nation-space of the novel, thus revealing the rule of Aboriginal Law in Indigenous Australia over and against the assumed sovereign rule of the nation-state.

Teaching Australian Indigenous Studies: Non-Indigenous academics negotiating structural impediments in a regional context

This paper examines the experiences of two non-Indigenous academics in a regional Australian university who taught/coordinated a first-year course, Introduction to Indigenous Australia (SCS130). Drawing on our own experiences, we explore the implications and contentious nature of non-Indigenous academics teaching Indigenous Studies and align this discussion with structural critique. As non-Indigenous academics, some argue that it is culturally disrespectful and pedagogically problematic for us to deliver this course. We consider that the work of embedding Indigenous perspectives should not be relegated solely the responsibility of Indigenous academics, and that our teaching contributes to reconciliation and begins to fill a significant gap in awareness and understanding among Australian students in higher education. The course SCS130 aims to introduce students to Indigenous perspectives through narratives, film, documentaries, academic and non-academic texts, biography and art. The objective of the course is to engage students with the complexity of colonisation and its ramifications for constructions of individual and national identities. Student survey qualitative data is used to provide an analysis of the course and to illustrate the conflict between our pedagogic practice, student expectations and the structural impediments to our decolonising teaching aims.