Indigenous Australian History Research Articles

Feeling the Past: Indigenous History and Emotions

Research that relates to Indigenous Australian history has changed considerably since Aboriginal history first emerged as a distinct field in the 1970s.1 Beginning as an interdisciplinary field, Ab...

Capturing "The Rabbits"

The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, is a beautifully designed yet melancholy allegory for the ‘discovery’ and subsequent colonisation of Australia. With its focus on Indigenous Australian history, Marsden has managed to summarise much of the Australian colonisation process in just 229 words. Since it was first published in 1998, the picture book has won multiple awards and continues to be a relevant text, with the issues depicted throughout still significant in Australia’s contemporary social and political spheres.

Beyond the Burden of History in Indigenous Australian Cinema

How Indigenous Australian history has been portrayed and who has been empowered to define it is a complex and controversial subject in contemporary Australian society. This article critically examines these issues through two Indigenous Australian films: Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and The Sapphires (2012). These two films contrast in style, theme and purpose, but each reclaims Indigenous history on its own terms. Nice Coloured Girls offers a highly fragmented and experimental history reclaiming Indigenous female agency through the appropriation of the colonial archive. The Sapphires eschews such experimentation. It instead celebrates Indigenous socio-political links with African American culture, ‘Black is beautiful’, and the American Civil Rights movements of the 1960s. Crucially, both these films challenge notions of a singular and tragic history for Indigenous Australia. Placing the films within their wider cultural contexts, this article highlights the diversity of Indigenous Australian cinematic expression and the varied ways in which history can be reclaimed on film. However, it also shows that the content, form and accessibility of both works are inextricably linked to the industry concerns and material circumstances of the day. This is a crucial and overlooked aspect of film analysis and has implications for a more nuanced appreciation of Indigenous film as a cultural archive.

Students Don't Know What They Don't Know: Dental and Oral Health Students' Perspectives on Developing Cultural Competence Regarding Indigenous Peoples.

Indigenous Australians experience poorer oral health than non-Indigenous Australians despite closing-the-gap initiatives. Cultural competence is an important skill in the delivery of oral health care. The need for academic institutions to incorporate Indigenous culture more widely into their curricula to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous peoples and to increase cultural competence for all students has been recognized. The aims of this study were to identify students' perceptions of Indigenous content in current dental and oral health curricula; perceived barriers and supports for developing students' Indigenous cultural competence; and recommended strategies to inform future education in Indigenous culture. Students in the Doctor of Dental Medicine (DMD) and Bachelor of Oral Health (BOH) programs at the University of Sydney participated in semi-structured interviews to explore barriers and supports to students' becoming more competent in Indigenous culture. Thematic analysis was used to synthesize the students' responses. Fifteen students participated in interviews. In analysis of the data, five key themes emerged: defining Indigenous cultural competence; current Indigenous cultural content; barriers to incorporating Indigenous education; future Indigenous curricular content and strategies; and diversity within student cohorts. These findings suggest that increasing Indigenous cultural competence among dental and oral health students requires an informed history of Indigenous Australians, engagement with Indigenous communities, and reflection on these experiences. Additionally, recruitment of Indigenous staff and students in the school will facilitate culturally appropriate ways to redress Indigenous health disparities and increase the overall health of Indigenous peoples.

Strengthening Indigenous cultural competence in dentistry and oral health education: Academic perspectives.

Indigenous Australians continue to experience significant oral health disparities, despite numerous closing-the-gap initiatives. Higher education institutions and accrediting bodies recognise the need to incorporate Indigenous culture more widely into dentistry curricula to address these inequalities. This study aimed to define and explore current Indigenous cultural competence curricula, identify enablers and barriers for integration of Indigenous cultural competence curricula and ascertain innovative strategies to aid students in becoming culturally competent upon graduation, from academics' perspectives. Academics from the Doctor of Dental Medicine (DMD) and Bachelor of Oral Health (BOH) programmes at the University of Sydney, School of Dentistry participated in semi-structured interviews to define and explore current and future curricula practices to enable students to become competent in Indigenous culture. Thematic analysis was conducted to synthesise academics' responses. Thirteen School of Dentistry academics participated in interviews. Following analysis of the data, six key themes emerged: Theme One: Transfer of Indigenous cultural knowledge, Theme Two: Barriers to developing Indigenous cultural curriculum. Theme Three: Importance of cultural immersion, Theme Four: Resources required for Indigenous cultural education, Theme Five: Proposed Indigenous cultural content, Theme Six: Strategies to incorporate Indigenous culture into curricula. Improving Indigenous cultural competence amongst dentistry academics and students requires an educational and philosophical shift, incorporating the social determinants of health whilst maintaining the strengths of the biomedical foundations of dental care. It requires the inclusion of an informed history of Indigenous Australians, immersion within Indigenous communities and reflection upon these experiences, to facilitate culturally appropriate ways to improve the provision of dentistry and oral health for Indigenous peoples.

Teaching and learning Indigenous history in comparative and transnational frame: lessons from the coalface

In first semester 2015, I taught second-year Indigenous Australian history as a comparative and transnational unit for the first time. My decision to do so related to pedagogical issues as well as developments in the field. I implemented structural changes to the way I taught the unit and refocused the content to reflect the transnational and comparative trend in the scholarship. Notwithstanding the benefits of my teaching innovations, it was the changed content that appeared to have the most educative value. Part of this was in broadening students’ understanding of Australian Indigenous history. Transferring transnational and comparative research into the classroom also helped to bring the local and global into closer connection. In this reflective piece, I look back at this learning and teaching experience. Included are the contributions of three students who undertook the unit and who flesh out the learning experience with contributions of their own.

Evolving Commemorations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service

Evolving Commemorations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service Noah Riseman (bio) In 1995 Australia’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs sponsored a series of commemorations dubbed Australia Remembers 1945–1995. A review indicated that over 70 percent of Australians and 90 percent of ex-service organizations and communities participated in associated events.1 Yet state reports suggested that one segment of the population did not significantly participate: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. These are Australia’s two Indigenous peoples: Aboriginal people’s traditional lands are on mainland Australia and Tasmania; while Torres Strait Islanders’ traditional lands are the islands of the Torres Strait, separating Australia from Papua New Guinea. Historian Liz Reed argues that the underparticipation of Indigenous communities during Australia Remembers underscored the different agendas of non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians. Both Prime Minister Paul Keating and Veterans’ Affairs Minister Con Sciacca emphasized narratives of racial unity during the war, reflecting the Keating government’s Reconciliation agenda. Although Indigenous Australians did want their war service recognized, they also wanted reparations for their war efforts and recognition of their ongoing marginalization within Australia.2 Flash-forward twenty years to the centenary of the First World War, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inclusion in commemorative events was quite conspicuous. Indeed, in the new millennium there has been a “boom” in commemorations of Indigenous military [End Page 80] service. To an extent this is a symptom of the global “memory boom,” but it is also a significant consequence of the Reconciliation movement and the History Wars.3 The Reconciliation movement of the 1990s sought to unite Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians through new understandings of shared histories, including discussions about violent colonial dispossession. While many Australians embraced the Reconciliation movement, among other sectors of the population there was a backlash against supposed special treatment accorded to Indigenous Australians.4 Part of this backlash manifested as the History Wars, which coincided with the 1996–2007 government of John Howard. Conservative pundits argued that academic historians exaggerated frontier violence and child removal, painting a wholly negative, “black armband” vision of Australian history. Most academic historians and public intellectuals retorted that conservatives were whitewashing Australian history to suit nationalist agendas.5 Indigenous military service comfortably transcended the History Wars while also supporting Reconciliation by showing a history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians working together. Invoking the language of shared sacrifice and Indigenous inclusion within Australia’s Anzac mythology spoke a language palatable to conservative Australian values. Amidst this wider sociopolitical context, new Indigenous ex-service organizations emerged and received support from local, state, and federal governments for memorials, marches, and services. The boom in Indigenous military commemorations also parallels a widespread valuing of military achievement in Australian society. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, among other historians, have criticized this “militarization of Australian history.” They argue that the valorization of military achievement in Australia is a deliberately manipulated act of conservative propaganda seeking to undermine public memory of colonization and to marginalize the place of Aboriginal victims of frontier violence in Australian history.6 Yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have also demonstrated a wish to honor their servicemen and servicewomen and have been doing so since the First World War. Such practices have incorporated Indigenous traditions while concurrently asserting military service as a legitimizing claim to Australian citizenship rights. The escalation of such commemorations in recent years and its increasing recognition by non-Indigenous Australians is in keeping with the global memory boom. While it may be argued that this offers a version of Indigenous Australian history that is “safe” for conservative, nationalistic, military-focused consumption, the boom has not diverted attention from the settler violence and Indigenous resistance to colonialism, sometimes dubbed the frontier wars.7 On the contrary, it has drawn attention to that missing chapter in the national military story. This [End Page 81] article will chronologically outline the history of commemorations of Australian Indigenous military service from the early, locally organized events to the recent boom in state and national commemorations. It relies on a mixture of Indigenous and newspaper sources, and the newspaper sources are especially interesting because they reveal examples of Indigenous participation in...

The Breaking of the ‘Great Australian Silence’: How and Why the Writing of Indigenous Australian History has Changed over the Last 40 Years

The Breaking of the ‘Great Australian Silence’: How and Why the Writing of Indigenous Australian History has Changed over the Last 40 Years

The Reforming State, the Concerned Public and Indigenous Political Actors

Strangely, two recent critical political histories of Indigenous affairs — by Gunstone and by Short — reproduce a structure of perception that resembles the characteristic structure of 1950s perception: a sense of outrage at the helplessness of Indigenous Australians in the face of overbearing colonial pressure, eclipsing the narrative presence of the Indigenous political agent. By returning to the work of those political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists who observed the political reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, I suggest that a richer conception of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous agency is both possible and necessary. There are three interlocking topics in the writing of Indigenous political history: the changing quality of non‐Indigenous engagement; the Indigenous leadership and its historical formation; the differentiated institutional response of the state. The political history of Indigenous Australians should not be reduced to a narrative of the settler colonial state's persistently limited concessions to the Indigenous grievance — important though that theme may be.

Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History: A View from the Other Side

Perhaps most disturbing is that [Windschuttle’s] position demonstrates a great ignorance about Indigenous people, society and culture, past and present, and the basis on which contemporary Indigenous people are asserting their rights. His appeal is to a constituency that shares such ignorance: he positions himself within populist racist ideologies rather than within the ongoing intellectual debate. The responsibility attached to the writing of Indigenous Australians’ histories is immense: no other history has the potential to impact on the present and the future and excite contention and debate to such a high degree. For myself, I approach the task with some misgiving as the fallout can be resounding ‐ my research interest, Indigenous family history with the reality of mixed race marriages and liaisons, is a potential minefield ... Why is the history of Indigenous Australians so difficult? As a people Australians have not yet come to terms with the past: the settler colonial society has not yet developed an interpretation of history that will wash the blood off their hands. Indigenous Australian individuals and groups are still overcoming the shock of colonialism and developing approaches to deal with the present and the past while trying to put in place strategies for the future. Moreover, Australians as a people have not yet come to terms with the dynamics of race in our society and how racism and colonialist attitudes manifest: they are so ingrained as to be a ‘natural’ response and an intrinsic part of culture. The ‘great Australian silence’, in Indigenous history until the last three decades, is testimony to the fact that Australian settler colonialism is overwhelmingly characterised by denial. Windschuttle’s interpretation of Tasmanian history from 1803-47 brings nothing new to the historiography of Indigenous Australian history: he has not written history as such but is attempting to critique the existing histories. This writing is a polemic, blatantly written from an ideological position, in order to prove a political point: that a conspiracy has existed amongst historians and others to prove excessive violence and brutality by the British in the colonial conquest of Australia and establish a case for Indigenous Australian reparations. It is a moot point, whether Windschuttle’s argument with Indigenous Tasmanians is incidental to his argument with those he perceives as left-wing historians. The attack on historians is part of his well-documented political agenda, publicised on his web-site www.sydneyline.com 1 where the term ‘left-wing’ is synonymous with idealistic, subjective and over-theorised. Windschuttle positions himself as the opposite: a realistic, objective, logical empiricist, who rejects rhetoric (my emphasis). 2