This lively book brings the reader close to the people from a remote cattle station in far north Australia, where black and white peoples' lives have been intertwined over the span of 80 years. Tracing the humorous, savage and ordinary ways in which race structured intimate and everyday relationships across a great divide, Gillian Cowlishaw makes startling and original arguments about race relations. By investigating specific patterns of interaction on Australia's cultural frontier, Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas illustrates how anthropologists, pastoralists and government officials squabbled about Aborigines as they intruded into their country, controlled aspects of their lives, and dominated the way they were represented in the public realm. The ironic title hints that the difference between 'redneck' pastoralists and 'egghead' anthropologists is not so great as might be imagined. Aborigines were central to the projects of both kinds of whitefellas. Weaving the shifts in government policy and public opinion with accounts of their sometimes ludicrous impact on outback communities, this book brings to life the complexities of living with racial categories. And it asks why increasingly enlightened anti-racist policies seldom seem to have worked as intended, even in this era of self-determination. This thought provoking work will speak not only to anthropologists and those interested in Aboriginal Australia, but to scholars of race more generally, especially in the burgeoning field of whiteness studies.

Historians have had little to say about the lands that stretch 'beyond the black stump'. These essays from around the country build inland Australia into our national history, crisscrossing both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors are Lorina Barker, Amanda Barry, Badger Bates, Peter Bishop, Nici Cumpston, Jean Duruz, Charles Fahey, Lionel Frost, Heather Goodall, Jenny Gregory, Patricia Grimshaw, Rodney Harrison, Rick Hosking, Darrell Lewis, Alan Mayne, Chrissiejoy Marshall, Margaret Somerville and Richard Waterhouse.

From the start of the new Australian nation in 1901, to the use of the female contraceptive pill in 1961, Let’s Talk About Sex explores the ways sexuality has been constructed, understood and experienced in Australia. Far from being something hidden and private, this work brings sexuality out into the open, and explains why sex is of social, cultural, political and economic importance. Let’s Talk About Sex is an inclusive history, surveying multiple and interwoven forms of sexuality, desire, pleasure, regulation and resistance. It begins with the long Victorian period: the hidden desires of women and the “hydraulic” sexual needs of men, both in the cities and on the frontier. It moves across the decades, considering heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbians and nascent ideas about queer and sexual difference. Lisa Featherstone highlights the tensions of the ages: venereal disease, homophobia, birth control, rape and child sexual assault. She analyses the ways non-normative sexuality was constructed as evil and perverse, but also how men and women responded to this pathologising of their desires. Let’s Talk About Sex provides a fascinating account of sex, gender, age and race, across the formative years of Australian society.

Charts the making of colonial spaces in settler colonies of the Pacific Rim during the last two centuries. Contributions journey through time, place and region, and piece together interwoven but discrete studies that illuminate transnational and local experiences - violent, ideological, and cultural - that produced settler-colonial space.

The adoption of White Australia as government policy in 1901 demonstrates that whiteness was crucial to the ways in which the new nation of Australia was constituted. And yet, historians have largely overlooked whiteness in their studies of Australia's racial past. Creating White Australia takes a fresh approach to the question of ‘race’ in Australian history. It demonstrates that Australia's racial foundations can only be understood by recognising whiteness too as 'race'. Including contributions from some of the leading as well as emerging scholars in Australian history, it breaks new ground by arguing that ‘whiteness’ was central to the racial ideologies that created the Australian nation. This book pursues the foundations of white Australia across diverse locales. It also situates the development of Australian whiteness within broader imperial and global influences. As the recent apology to the Stolen Generations, the Northern Territory Intervention and controversies over asylum seekers reveal, the legacies of these histories are still very much with us today.

Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity. Moving beyond the static “either/or” categories of racial identification found within typical insular conversations about mixed-race peoples, Shape Shifters explores these mixed-race identities as fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. This volume expands our understandings of how individuals and ethnic groups identify themselves within their own sociohistorical contexts. The essays in Shape Shifters explore different historical eras and reach across the globe, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, the Native peoples of the missions of Spanish California, and racial shape shifting among African Americans in the post–civil rights era. At different times in their lives or over generations in their families, racial shape shifters have moved from one social context to another. And as new social contexts were imposed on them, identities have even changed from one group to another. This is not racial, ethnic, or religious imposture. It is simply the way that people’s lives unfold in fluid sociohistorical circumstances. With contributions by Ryan Abrecht, George J. Sánchez, Laura Moore, and Margaret Hunter, among others, Shape Shifters explores the forces of migration, borderlands, trade, warfare, occupation, colonial imposition, and the creation and dissolution of states and empires to highlight the historically contingent basis of identification among mixed-race peoples across time and space.