Onsman provides a new look at how one of the most influential portrayals of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, the one put forward in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, has changed from simply reflecting an academic idea to becoming pro-active in presenting contemporary images: a change that began when the museum employed an Aboriginal curator to manage its collection.

Reclaiming the Land: The indigenous Aboriginal peoples of Australia once inhabited the whole continent. For over 50,000 years their rich and varied culture revolved around the land. In 1788 began the white invasion of Australia which destroyed many Aboriginal communities. Thousands of Aborigines died of disease, from poisons, and in frontier wars when their land was stolen and used for agriculture, grazing and mining. Aboriginal rights were unrecognized in law. Two centuries later Aborigines have achieved legal equality. But their rights are often disregarded and they suffer massive inequalities in housing, education, employment and health compared to other Australians. They are more likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Since 1980 over 100 young Aboriginal men have died while in police custody. But the greatest loss has been of land and it is the need to regain and protect the land which has been the impetus behind contemporary Aboriginal political activity - a struggle which many Aborigines believe has been betrayed by successive governments. In the Northern Territory and South Australia large areas have come under Aboriginal ownership but other states have conceded little or nothing. Today an historic High Court judgment has opened the way to a new relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal Australians gives a concise and factual account of the major problems currently facing Aborigines. This updated edition traces developments into the 1990s, including the Mabo judgment and its consequences. A useful and detailed report on a unique people and their fight for justice, it should prove an invaluable resource for teachers, students, the media and all those interested in racism and Australia.

This volume provides an important new synthesis of archaeological work carried out in Australia on the post-contact period. It draws on dozens of case studies from a wide geographical and temporal span to explore the daily life of Australians in settings such as convict stations, goldfields, whalers' camps, farms, pastoral estates and urban neighbourhoods. The different conditions experienced by various groups of people are described in detail, including rich and poor, convicts and their superiors, Aboriginal people, women, children, and migrant groups. The social themes of gender, class, ethnicity, status and identity inform every chapter, demonstrating that these are vital parts of human experience, and cannot be separated from archaeologies of industry, urbanization and culture contact. The book engages with a wide range of contemporary discussions and debates within Australian history and the international discipline of historical archaeology. The colonization of Australia was part of the international expansion of European hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The material discussed here is thus fundamentally part of the global processes of colonization and the creation of settler societies, the industrial revolution, the development of mass consumer culture, and the emergence of national identities. Drawing out these themes and integrating them with the analysis of archaeological materials highlights the vital relevance of archaeology in modern society.

Basic facts, a chronology, a bibliography, and a list of suggested reading make up the appendixes. --Book Jacket.

This book explores storytelling as an innovative means of improving understanding of Indigenous people and their histories and struggles including with the law. It uses the Critical Race Theory (‘CRT’) tool of ‘outsider’ or ‘counter’ storytelling to illuminate the practices that have been used by generations of Aboriginal women to create an outlaw culture and to resist their invisibility to law. Legal scholars are yet to use storytelling to bring the experiential knowledge of Aboriginal women to the centre of legal scholarship and yet this book demonstrates how this can be done by way of a new methodology that combines elements of CRT with speculative biography. In one chapter, the author tells the imagined story of Eliza Woree who featured prominently in the backdrop to the decision of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Dempsey v Rigg (1914) but whose voice was erased from the judgements. This accessible book adds a new and innovative dimension to the use of CRT to examine the nexus between race and settler colonialism. It speaks to those interested in Indigenous peoples and the law, Indigenous studies, Indigenous policy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, feminist studies, race and the law, and cultural studies.

The contemporary study of Australian literature ranges widely across issues of general cultural studies, the politics of identity (both ethnic and gendered), and the position of Australia within wider postcolonial contexts. This volume intervenes in the most significant of issues in these areas from a variety of international perspectives.

A history of the role of biological theories in the construction and "protection" of whiteness in Australia from the first European settlement through World War II.