The required and extended readings for each week are available through Leganto (see the top of your iLearn site).

Week 1. Beginnings

Tuesday February 25

This unit deals critically with the relationship between anthropology and Indigenous Australians. Where should our explorations begin? We will soon learn of the deep history of the human presence on this continent, but for now we will begin by reading debates about the anthropological enterprise and its legacy. I’ve set a powerful poem called ‘ologist’ by Gomeroi scholar and poet Alison Whittaker as the required reading for our first week. Whittaker captures a First Nations’ critique of the social scientist gaze, and drive to ‘discover’ indigeneity. I’ve also included a long list of background reading, from which I’d like you to select two readings to do in your own time. Aboriginal thinkers Ian Anderson and Michael Dodson reflect on anthropology as a colonial way of knowing Aboriginality, while Yin Paradies examines his own decisions about identification and the broader structures shaping it. Gillian Cowlishaw and Diane Barwick are two anthropologists whose work both vigorously defends the anthropological drive to know and understand cultural others, but who also closely engage with Aboriginal people’s determination to define and describe life on their own terms. Historian Laura Rademaker explores the connection between anthropologist Jane Goodale and her Tiwi island interlocutors. Dick Kimber’s chapter in First Australians provides an informally written introduction to the Horn Scientific Expedition, which included Baldwin Spencer. Spencer, together with Frank Gillen went on to publish The Native Tribes of Central Australia in 1899, among the first works of anthropology detailing Aboriginal ceremonial life. We will learn more about nineteenth century and early twentieth century Australianist anthropology in lectures.

This first lecture will also provide an introduction to the unit, its scope and aim, and an explanation of requirements and student assessment. There are no tutorials in Week 1. Again, you are not expected to read all of the work listed below! Select at least two as background reading.

Required reading:

• Alison Whittaker. 2018. ologist. In Blakwork, Broome: Magabala Books, 148-9.

Background reading:

• Ian Anderson. 2003 Introduction: The Aboriginal Critique of Colonial Knowing. In M. Grossman, ed. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 17-24.
• Michael Dodson. 2003 The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality. In M. Grossman, ed. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 25-42.
• Yin Paradies. 2006 Beyond Black and White: Essentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity. Journal of Sociology 42(4), 355-367.
• Gillian Cowlishaw. 2015 Friend or foe? Anthropology’s encounter with Aborigines. Inside Story. 
• Gillian Cowlishaw. 1987 Colour, Culture and the Aboriginalists. Man, 221-237.​
• Diane Barwick. 1988 Aborigines of Victoria. In Ian Keen (ed), Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in ‘Settled’ Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 27-32.
• Dick Kimber. 2008 The Sea met the Desert, and the Desert Met the Sea. In Rachel Perkins and Marcia Langton (eds). First Australians, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 174-223. 
• Lara Rademaker. 2019 White grief, happy friendship: Jane Goodale and emotional anthropological research. History and Anthropology, 30:3, 313-330.

 

Week 2.  A human-created continent

Tuesday March 3

We turn out attention to another kind of beginning this week, in discussion of the over 65,000 years long human inhabitation of this continent. Read Billy Griffiths’ essay for an account of these beginnings, a story partially told in ‘stones and bones, sediment and pollan’.  Aboriginal peoples’ varied ways of living on this continent will next be examined. Anthropologists have long charactised Indigenous Australians as ‘hunter gatherers’—but we use Bunurong and Yuin writer Bruce Pascoe’s work to expand our understanding of the ways in which Indigenous people hunted, collected, farmed and cultivated, ultimately shaping a human-created landscape. Further, we probe the limitations involved in the very practice of classifying, which draws on outdated social evolutionary models that shaped anthropology’s beginnings. We will also consider what it means for some Indigenous people to eat ‘bush foods’ today.

We will watch parts of the documentary series, First Footprints in the lecture.

Required reading:

• Billy Griffiths. 2013 A World in a Grain of Sand. Griffith Review, no. 41, 162-177.  https://griffithreview.com/articles/a-world-in-a-grain-of-sand/
• Bruce Pascoe. 2014 Agriculture. In Dark Emu, Broome: Magabala Books, 19-52.
• Extracts from Sue Coleman Haseldine and Marcina Coleman Richards. 2012 Nguly Gy Yadoo Mai (Our Good Food). To be distributed and read in class.  

Extended reading:

• Bill Gammage. 2012 The closest ally. In The Biggest Estate on Earth. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 157-186.
• Elizabeth Povinelli. 1994 ‘Today We Struggle’: Contemporary Hunting, Fishing, and Collecting and the Market, In Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, 168-202.
• Paul Memmott. 2007 Australian Indigenous Architecture – An Overview. In Gunyah goondie + wurley: the Aboriginal architecture of Australia. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 4-19.
• Claire Coleman. 2017. When we encountered the nomads. Meanjin: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/when-we-encountered-the-nomads-2/
• Tom Griffiths. 2019. Reading Bruce Pascoe. Inside Story: https://insidestory.org.au/reading-bruce-pascoe/

 

Week 3. Dreamings, ceremony and Country

We have been learning about the past and present of intimate people-land relations. This week, we inquire into anthropological accounts of Aboriginal worldviews or cosmologies, and their embodiment and objectification in ceremonies and social relations. As Aboriginal people strongly assert and anthropologists have long identified, the living land and waters created by ancestral beings, or Country, is the cornerstone of traditional Aboriginal life. The terms ‘Dreaming’ and/or ‘Dreamtime’ are now commonly used in Australia. We will learn of their entry into the broader lexicon from Spencer and Gillen's recordings. We will ask what exactly is meant by terms such as ‘totemism,’ ‘Country’ and ‘Dreaming’? How do these concepts help us to understand different understandings of the earth, emplacement, belonging, and social relations?

Required reading:

• Kumpaya Girgiba in conversation with Ngalangka Nola Taylor. 2017 Follow their footprints. In Margo Neale (ed), Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 26-27
• W.E.H. Stanner. 2009 (1953) The Dreaming. In Robert Mann (ed), The Dreaming and Other Essays. Melbourne: Black Inc, 172-224.
• Tony Swain and Gary Trompf. 1995 Tradition. In The Religions of Oceania, London and New York: Routledge, 19-47.
• Catherine Berndt. 1979 Land of the Rainbow Snake. Sydney: William Collins (selections will be read in class)

Extended reading:

• Paddy Roe. 2016 Lardi. In Gularabulu. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 97-106.
• Tony Swain. 1993 Introduction and Worlds to Endure. In A Place for Strangers: Towards a history of Australian Aboriginal Being, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1-68.
• David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic. 1993 Cultural Sensitivity and Waanangga—the Sugarbag Site. In Yorro Yorro, Broome: Magabala Books, v and 71-75.
• Nancy Munn. 1971 The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth. In Ronald M Berndt (ed.) Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, University of Western Australian Press, Nedlands.
• Georgia Curran. 2019 ‘Waiting for Jardiwanpa: History and Mediation in Warlpiri Fire Ceremonies. Oceania 89(1), 20-35.
• Francoise Dussart. 2004 Shown but not Shared, Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990–2000. Australian Journal of Anthropology 15, 253-266.
• Patrick Wolfe. 1991 On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33, 2, 197-224.
• Alan Rumsey. 1994 The Dreaming, Human Agency and Inscriptive Practice, Oceania, 65, 2, 116-130.

 

Week 4. Relatedness, kin, family

Tuesday March 17

This week we shift the focus from people-land relations to people’s relationships to each other. The study of the intricacies and complexities of First Nations’ kinship systems was an early preoccupation of the anthropological endeavor in Australia, and remains important to the discipline. Aboriginal writing and scholarship also centres the question of family and relatedness, in very different ways. Reading Fred Myers and the extended reading by Dianne Austin-Broos, we learn that social relations can be better understood when we consider people’s rights and relationships to material objects. Drawing on Sally Babidge’s research in a Queensland country town, we will also explore the way kinship concepts are activated in urban and regional settings today, using the concept of ‘performative kinship’.

 Required reading:

• Jack Latimore. 2018 Far enough to be on my way back home. In Anita Heiss (ed), Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, Melbourne: Black Inc.
• Fred Myers. 1989 Burning the Truck and Holding the Country: Pintupi Forms of Property and Identity. In E. Wilmsen (ed), We are here: politics of Aboriginal land tenure, Berkeley: University of California Press, 15-43.
• Sally Babidge. 2010 Family Affairs: Relations and Relatedness. Aboriginal Family and the State: The Conditions of History, Ashgate Publishing, 101-133.

Extended reading:

• Diane Austin-Broos. 2009 Living with Kin. In Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 130-153.
• Belinda Burbidge. 2015 ‘We are the kangaroo, we have the owl’: Linguistic and emotional clues of the meanings of the bush in changing Wiradjuri being and relatedness. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 26(3), 414-427.

 

 

Week 5. From civil rights to the Bark Petition

Tuesday March 24

Throughout the unit so far, we have been emphasising the need to understand Aboriginal culture forms within colonial history.  This week our attention shifts even more explicitly to historical events. We go to the twentieth century, and particularly to changing Indigenous political and cultural aspirations in the post-war period. Our focus over the next two weeks is on how the Indigenous-land relations we have been learning about articulate with the broader settler colonial society and state. We track the emergence of a cultural politics at this time, and consider how ‘traditional’ meanings and messages are conveyed to new audiences. A generation of anthropologists became involved in both the establishment of outstations and in land claims in this new era with complex consequences, as we will discuss over the next two weeks.  

 Required reading:                  

• Charlie Ward. 2016 Taking a stand, 1966-1968. In A Handful of Sand. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing.
• Heidi Norman. Aboriginal Land Rights: From ‘Reserves’ to ‘Country’. In What Do We Want? A Political History of Aboriginal Land Rights in New South Wales, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1-28.

Extended reading:

• Howard Morphy. 1983 ‘Now you understand’: An analysis of the way Yolngu have used sacred knowledge to retain their autonomy. In Nicolas Peterson and Marcia Langton (eds), Aborigines, Land, and Land Rights, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies,110-133.
• Miranda Johnson. 2016 Australia’s First ‘First People’, The Land is Our History. New York: Oxford University Press, 35-55.
• Fred Myers. 2016 History, memory and the politics of self-determination at an early outstation. In Nicolas Peterson and Fred Myers (eds), Experiments in Self-Determination. Histories of the outstation movement in Australia. Canberra: ANU Press, 81-103.

 

Week 6. Land and the politics of recognition 

Tuesday March 31

As we have seen, from the early 1970s until the early 1990s, Aboriginal efforts to secure recognition of their prior occupation and status as land owners made strides at state, territory, and national levels, most prominently in light of the Commonwealth Land Rights Act, NT (1976). This week we also discuss the Mabo ruling that led to the 1993 Native Title Act. The lecture and readings introduce critical perspectives on the politics of recognition, the notion of cultural difference, and what it has come to stand for. Why are land rights and sacred sites legislation so important to Aboriginal people? Do you think that Mabo fostered European understanding of Aboriginal land tenure? Does native title offer a way for European and Aboriginal reconciliation? What are some ways we might think of the unintended consequences of native title legislation for Indigenous identities and senses of belonging? What role has anthropology played in all of this?

Required reading:

• Elizabeth Povinelli. 1998 The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 575-610.
• Uluru Statement from the Heart (Available in iLearn)

Extended reading:

• Gary Foley. 2007 The Australian Labor Party and the Native Title Act, In Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed), Sovereign subjects: Indigenous sovereignty matters, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
• Eve Vincent. 2017 ‘We know who we are’: the impact of native title on local identities. In ‘Against Native Title’: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 89-108.
• Simon Correy, Diana McCarthy and Anthony Redmond. The differences which resemble: The effects of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ in the constitution and maintenance of native title claimant groups in Australia. In Bauman, T. and G. Macdonald (eds), Unsettling Anthropology: The Demands of Native Title on Worn Concepts and Changing Lives, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 41-62.
• Katie Glaskin, 2017 A Land and Sea Claim. In Crosscurrents: Law and society in a native title claim to land and sea. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing.
• Francesca Merlan 2006 Beyond Tradition, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 7 (1), 85-104.

 

Week 7. Work, welfare and Indigenous Australians

Tuesday April 7

Indigenous people have long been a part of the settler colonial economy, as the reading by Maria Nugent makes clear. This fact is often overlooked in the public debate about Indigenous Australians’ relationship with the welfare state. Over the past two decades in Australia public attention has been especially focused on the high rates of Aboriginal unemployment in remote regions. Prominent Indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson has long argued that in the pre-colonial period Aboriginal people partook of a ‘real economy’, where the labour of hunting and food collecting was crucial to the reproduction of Indigenous society. After the decline, beginning in the 1960s-1970s, of rural economies and industries such as pastoralism, which relied on exploited seasonal Indigenous labour, welfare payments came to replace what Pearson calls ‘real work’. The oral history of Myles Lalor tells us something of this earlier period, as do Ruby Ginibi Langford’s recollections.

Required reading:

• Myles Lalor with Jeremy Beckett. Working around Wilcannia. In Wherever I Go, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 101-114.
• Noel Pearson. 2009 Our Right To Take Responsibility. In Up From The Mission: Selected Writings. Melbourne, Black Inc., 143-171.
• Fiona Skyring. 2012 Low Wages, Low Rents, and Pension Cheques: The introduction of equal wages in the Kimberley, 1968–1969, In Natasha Fijn et al (eds), Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies II: Historical engagements and current enterprises, Canberra: ANU Press, 153-170 (Group A: READ THIS IF YOUR SURNAME BEGINS WITH A-M)
• Diane Austin Broos. 2003 Places, practices, and things: The articulation of Arrernte kinship with welfare and work, American Ethnologist, Vol. 30(1), 118-135 (Group B: READ THIS IF YOUR SURNAME BEGINS WITH N-Z)

Extended reading:

• Ruby Langford. 1988 The Fencing Circus. In Don’t Take Your Love to Town, Melbourne: Penguin Books, 83-93.
• Steve Kinnane, Judy Harrison and Isabelle Reinecke, 2015. Finger money: The black and white of stolen wages, Griffith REVIEW, No. 47, 2015, 49-70.
• Maria Nugent. 2012 An Economy of Shells: A brief history of La Perouse  Aboriginal women’s shell-work and its markets, 1880–2010. In Natasha Fijn et al (eds), Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies II: Historical engagements and current enterprises, Canberra: ANU Press, 211-228.
• Lorraine Gibson. 2013 Making a Life: Getting Ahead, and Getting a Living in Aboriginal New South Wales, Oceania, 80: 2, 143-160.

 

Mid-session recess Monday April 13 – Friday April 24.

 

Week 8. Doing good in Indigenous Australia?

Tuesday April 28

Guest lecturer Drew Anderson will focus the anthropological gaze on non-Indigenous people this week, discussing various helping practices. Drew’s lecture will deal with questions of help, harm, segregation and solidarity.

Required readings / viewing:

• Drew Anderson. 2019 Forming a Humanitarian Brand: Childhood and Affect in Central Australia. In Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention, Cheney, Kristen, and Aviva Sinervo, eds. Pp. 205-226. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
• Dameyon Bonson. 2018 ‘Culture’ is not going to bring down the Indigenous suicide rate. The Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/21/culture-is-not-going-to-bring-down-the-indigenous-suicide-rate
• Please also watch the two clips of Gary Foley speaking, which are available in iLearn

Extended reading:

• Kim Mahood. 2012 Kartiya are like Toyotas: White workers on Australia’s cultural frontier, Griffith Review, 36.
• Emma Kowal. 2008 The Politics of the Gap: Indigenous Australians, Liberal Multiculturalism, and the End of the Self-Determination Era, American Anthropologist, 110 (3), 338-348.

 

Week 9. Reading ethnography

Tuesday May 5

There is no lecture this week. We will discuss our chosen ethnography in your tutorial.

Required readings:

Arrive at your tutorial having read the introduction and at least one chapter of an ethnography / extended work from the books collected in the ‘Book List’ at the top of your Leganto library. These items have all been place on reserve. I strongly suggest you select a work that is relevant to your research essay, which is due at the end of Week 9.

The short essay question for this week involves a book review of your chosen ethnography. You may wish to consider this ahead of time—if you’re really getting into the text you have selected, and decide to read the whole thing, then selecting this week to submit a short essay will allow you to explore the significance of your chosen ethnography.

 

Week 10. Self-determination, interventionist policies and the Uluru statement: anthropology and the state

Tuesday May 12

We have been circling around the question of the state’s role in Indigenous lives, a question brought into focus with the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response (‘the Intervention’). The debates surrounding the Intervention involved an accusation levelled at anthropologists: that their fixation with land-based cultural difference had blinded anthropologists to the suffering of remote-living First Nations people. This week, we focus our attention firmly on the state from an anthropological perspective. We ask: What might an anthropology of the state, ‘state effects’ and state practices look like? Where and what is ‘the state’? How does the state constitute and govern contemporary Aboriginal subjects? How do Aboriginal people meet the state? 

We will return at this point to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, as canvassed in an earlier discussion of state recognition.

Required reading:

• Fisher, Daniel. 2013 Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation, Intra‐Indigenous Relatedness, and the State Effect. Oceania 83, 238-258.
• Musharbash, Yasmine. 2010 ‘Only whitefella take that road’: Culture seen through the intervention at Yuendumu. In: Altman J and Hinkson M (eds) Culture crisis: anthropology and politics in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

Extended reading:

• Larissa Behrendt. 2007 The emergency we had to have. In Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (eds), Coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia. North Carlton, Vic: Arena Publications Association, 15-20.
• Cowlishaw, Gillian. 1998 Erasing Culture and Race: Practising ‘Self-Determination’, Oceania, vol. 68, no. 3, 145-169.
• Collmann, Jeff. 1988 Living in the Fringe-Camps. In Fringe-dwellers and Welfare: the Aboriginal response to Bureaucracy, St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 73-104.
• Vincent, Eve. 2018 Governing Indigenous Difference Differently: The Politics of Disgust, Compassion and Life, Oceania, vol. 88, no. 3, pp. 320-335.

 

Week 11: Entanglements with Settler law

Tuesday May 19

From the police shooting of Kumanjayi Walker in late 2019, to the 2016 Don Dale scandal to the 2019 coronial inquest into David Dungay’s death in custody, we often hear media stories that tell of Indigenous people’s entanglements with the Settler legal system. In Western Australia, the rate of incarceration for Indigenous Australians is 20 times higher than for non-Indigenous people; rates of Indigenous incarceration have in fact continued to rise markedly since the new millennium. How might anthropological analyses help us make sense of this sobering statistical picture? What historical, political and cultural frames shed light on the relationship between Indigenous people, Settler law and correctional institutions?  

Required reading:​

• Morris, Barry. 2013 Postcolonial fantasy and anxiety in the North West. In Protest, Land Rights and Riots, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 98-127
• McCoy, Brian. 2008. Prison: More than a Holiday. In Holding Men: Kanyirninpa and the Health of Aboriginal Men. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 167-189.
• WATCH: Allan Clarke’s Blood on the Tracks or listen to the podcast. See: http://www.abc.net.au/austory/blood-on-the-tracks---part-1/9795718

Extended reading:

• Melinda Hinkson and Thalia Anthony. 2019. Three Shots. Arena Magazine, https://arena.org.au/three-shots-by-melinda-hinkson-and-thalia-anthony/
• Marcia Langton. 1988 Medicine Square. In Ian Keen (ed), Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in ‘Settled’ Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 201-225.
• Celeste Liddle 2018 Police still failing Aboriginal Women. Eureka Street https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=55967
• Tim Rowse. 2015 Historical reasoning about Indigenous imprisonment: A community of fate? Australian Review of Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 1, 1-21.
• Harry Blagg and Thalia Anthony. 2014 ‘If Those Old Women Catch You, You’re Going to Cop It’: Night Patrols, Indigenous Women, and Place Based Sovereignty in Outback Australia. African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: AJCJS, vol. 8, no. 1, 103-124.

 

Week 12. The significance of place

Tuesday May 26

Uncle Phil Duncan from Walanga Muru will join us this week to give vital background for your final assessment item, the Koori Sydney site visit.

Required reading:

• Sally Morgan.  1987 What people are we? In My Place, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Extended Reading:

• Jo Rey and Neil Harrison. 2018 Sydney as an Indigenous Place: 'Goanna Walking' brings people together. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous People, 14(1), 81-89.
• Heidi Norman. 2015 Parramatta and Black Town Native Insitutions.https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/parramatta_and_black_town_native_institutions
• Melinda Hinkson. 2010 Ball’s Reserve site. In Aboriginal Sydney: A guide to important places of the past and present, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press,10-11.
• Heidi Norman. 2012 A Modern Day Corroborree—the New South Wales Annual Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout Carnival, Sport in Society, vol. 15, no. 7, 997-1013.
• Gillian Cowlishaw. 2009 Finding Informants. In The City’s Outback, Sydney: UNSW Press, 38-67.
• WATCH: Redfern Now

 

Week 13. Conclusions

Tuesday June 2

In this concluding lecture, we will survey the major themes of the course.