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poverty, poor environmental health and mental distress, a high death rate for infants and small children, and appallingly high rates of suicide, violence and substance abuse. As will become clear, patterns of ill-health lock into the struggles around land rights. At a concrete level, however, almost all Indigenous Australians, including those who live beyond the immediate scope of land rights, are affected by high levels of disease. Questions of Aboriginal health often have a curious status. The linkage between Aboriginal ill-health and what could
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.
This book argues for greater openness in the ways we approach human rights and international rights promotion, and in so doing brings some new understanding to old debates. Starting with the realities of abuse rather than the liberal architecture of rights, it casts human rights as a language for probing the political dimensions of suffering. Seen in this context, the predominant Western models of right generate a substantial but also problematic and not always emancipatory array of practices. These models are far from answering the questions about the nature of political community that are raised by the systemic infliction of suffering. Rather than a simple message from ‘us’ to ‘them’, then, rights promotion is a long and difficult conversation about the relationship between political organisations and suffering. Three case studies are explored: the Tiananmen Square massacre, East Timor's violent modern history and the circumstances of indigenous Australians. The purpose of these discussions is not to elaborate on a new theory of rights, but to work towards rights practices that are more responsive to the spectrum of injury that we inflict and endure.
received training to be ‘native nurses’ who worked in hospitals on settlements In this chapter, an indigenous historical lens is applied to the status of Indigenous nurses and midwives in Australia. I explore the establishment of Australia’s nursing profession, and compare training of white nurses with training received by ‘native nurses’. I suggest that Australia failed to respond to the British Colonial Nursing Service’s agenda and argue that this failure, in part, contributed to the poor health status experienced by Indigenous Australians. I propose that four issues
protest and criticism of Cook has occasionally been aired. Yet, despite the discredited imperial ideologies with which exploration has been so intimately associated, Cook’s popularity has been surprisingly resilient. This chapter does not attempt to review the whole range of representations and reinterpretations of Cook’s voyages to the two antipodean colonies of white settlement, or elsewhere; instead, my interest is more specifically in how key aspects of Cook’s encounters with Maori and indigenous Australians have been imagined and
: it had plagued the white supporters of Indigenous Australians for generations, a cause which demonstrated to some of Amnesty’s early adherents that benevolence and rights were not necessarily bedfellows. Amnesty and the challenge of Indigenous injustice Aside from supporting prisoners abroad, Amnesty sections also took it upon themselves to recommend for adoption prisoners in their own countries. Kenneth Cmeil explains how
The nature of German anthropological observations of indigenous peoples remains a fraught one, as the debate between H Glenn Penny, Andrew Zimmerman and Jens Uwe Guettel demonstrates. Via an investigation of Friedrich Gerstäcker’s representations of Australia and Indigenous Australians, this chapter explores the nature of German travellers’ depictions of the Indigenous peoples of Australia.
This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism.
194 THE CLASH AROUND THE WORLD 10 The one struggle: The Clash, Gary Foley, punk politics and Indigenous Australian activism Alessandro Moliterno On the evening of 23 February 1982, The Clash appeared on stage at Melbourne’s Festival Hall. Towards the end of their set, the band launched into one of their well-known reggae covers, ‘Armagideon Time’. At this point, they were joined on stage by the prominent Indigenous Australian activist Gary Foley. The music receded into an instrumental soundscape, as Foley took to the microphone and, with clarity and
Australia’s first Migration Museum in Adelaide recognised from its inception in 1986 that representing migration history could not be done without acknowledging its intimate association with colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous people. Its first move, therefore, was to create a distinction between all migrants, a category that included British ‘settlers’, and Indigenous Australians. This was significant not only because it implicated colonisation within migration history but because it made all non-Indigenous Australians migrants. The move though, was not easy to establish, largely because, in the public imagination, migrants were the other to mainstream or ‘British Australia’. In the mid-1990s, however, it seemed to work as Australia was indeed seen as a country that was relatively successful in integrating various waves of migration into its historical narratives while valuing cultural diversity and recognising the prior occupation of the land by Aboriginal people. The ‘War on terror’, the arrival of asylum seekers and the threat of internal terrorist attacks, along with changes in immigration policy and a general climate of fear have changed that, and migration museums are now working to combat a new wave of racism. To do so, I argue, they have developed a new set of curatorial strategies that aim to facilitate an exploration of the complexity of contemporary forms of identity. This chapter provides a history of the development of curatorial strategies that have helped to change the ways in which relations between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have changed over the years in response to changes in the wider public discourse. My focus is on both collecting and display practices, from changes to what is collected and how it is displayed, to the changing role of personal stories, the relationship between curators and the communities they work with, and the role of exhibition design in structuring the visitor experience.