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Conciliation, and Governor Phillip in his performance of it, have been lauded as exceptional. Anthropologist and historian Inga Clendinnen credits him as a visionary in his willingness to understand cross-cultural issues and integrate Indigenous Australians into the emergent colony and society. 4 Others have gone so far as to label him a humanitarian in his handling of the relationship. 5 Such claims raise Phillip’s stocks as a hero of
teachings. Comprising self-regulation and coping strategies, we can ask whether indeed these constitute any form of enchantment. Ahmed’s investigations of diversity and social justice work within UK and Australian higher education systems and among Indigenous Australians challenge homologous categorisations of pain and emotion. For her, thoughts, sensations, and emotions are not
Empire. In Australia, James Cook’s Endeavour journals provide the first hundred or so Indigenous words collected, in the Guugu Yimidhirr language of Cape York Peninsula. Early attempts to learn Australian Indigenous languages tended to be undertaken by individuals marked by a personal curiosity and, often, close relationships with particular Indigenous individuals or groups. Yet because of the vast array and complexity of Indigenous Australian languages – estimated to be over 300 in the precolonial period – the task was difficult; the work was local and inchoate
-colonial Tasmanian culture as degenerate, de-evolved, and extinct (Smith 2004 , 180–2). Jones’ publications were not the first to argue that Tasmanian culture was “degenerate” or “de-evolved.” In fact, his work added to a long history of European writing about the technology and society of Indigenous Tasmanian people. Colonialist, imperialist, and frankly racist discussions of Indigenous Australia feature in most of the foundational texts of anthropology and archaeology. In these works, written within the framework of European colonization and Anglo-centric racism, Indigenous
of poetic narrative. He took the first steps in this direction in 1966 with the composition of the long poem the man with seven toes. The poem was inspired by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan’s series of paintings recreating the story of Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked off the coast of Queensland in 1836 and compelled to live for several months in an indigenous Australian community. Mrs Fraser was eventually accosted by Bracefell, an escaped convict, who led her to safety through the bush, only to be betrayed back into custody by his companion at the
Curthoys, and John Docker, eds, Passionate Histories: Myth Memory, and Indigenous Australia (Canberra, 2010), p. 10.
than as a process. Non-Indigenous Australians regularly reiterated the nexus between civilisation and citizenship, arguing that citizenship was a qualification, not an entitlement. In 1938 Mary Bennett, for example, complained to the Commissioner for Native Affairs in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, that as ‘the whole world is revising interracial legislation, and there is noticeably throughout Australia a growing spirit of goodwill and fair play towards the native race’, the Western Australian practice of ‘making “colour” and not “civilization” the basis of
historical encounter with Aboriginal society, the ways this has subsequently been represented, and the implications of both of these things for contemporary non-indigenous Australians, their sense of belonging and nationhood, and the legitimacy of their presence in Australia. Anne Curthoys explains ‘The History Wars’’ vehemence as a function of the sense of victimhood that she
, MSM534, James Dredge, Diaries, Notebook and Letterbooks, 1817–1845, James Dredge, 30 April 1840; Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson , vol. 1, pp. 248–56. 44 Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia Through God, Charity and Empire, 1825–1855 (Canberra
understanding of their rights as human beings. 2 German physical and cultural anthropologists of the mid- to late nineteenth century have similarly been described as following a more humane, less racialising approach to the investigation of colonised peoples in general. 3 This chapter explores this idea, to offer a sense of how Indigenous Australians figured in German anthropological investigations. Australian Aborigines initially came to the attention of German