Rock Against Racism (RAR) concerts in Australia were a series of concerts put on by Aboriginal communities with the intention of strengthening the Aboriginal community through music. The three major aims of the concerts were to generate pride in Aboriginal music and community by displaying new Aboriginal artists and bands, to generate systemic change to the challenges facing Aboriginal people in Australia through awareness raising and connection with activism projects, and to raise money for community-based needs. This article aims to provide a brief history of Rock Against Racism in Australia, emphasising how the concerts represented the Black Power approach to community organisation used by Aboriginal communities at the time. Oral history interviews conducted with RAR organisers and musicians Kelli McGuinness and Dave Arden, and Alan Brown of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service, were undertaken to tell this story. Extensive use of primary source materials from the Aboriginal History Archive has also helped to understand RAR. As this is a subject that is scarcely written about and recorded, these sources have been invaluable. Through analysis of footage, funding documents, proposal documents and interviews, this article argues that RAR was an effective example of community organisation, the legacy of which can be seen in the Australia's music scene today.
n 1847 the Western Australian Legislative Council passed An Ordinance to diminish the Dangers resulting from Bush Fires as the first law attempting to regulate the incidence of landscape fire in the Swan River Colony. This tool of colonialism was widely used to suppress burning by Noongar people, and had the consequence of limiting the capacity of First Nations Australians' ability to care for Country. Beyond that it did little to ameliorate destructive bushfires, and the long-term consequences of the suppression of First Nations people's ability to manage the landscape using fire are still being felt today
This article is part of an Aboriginal History Archive research project that interrogates the importance of radical Black educational spaces in the development of the Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Movement in Australia. We document how Black Power activists Bruce McGuinness and Gary Foley, along with non-Indigenous academic John Morieson, created and ran what we believe is the first tertiary course in Melbourne for Aboriginal students only: the Community Organisation Course at Swinburne College of Technology, 1975-1977. Drawing on records held at the Aboriginal History Archive, particularly the Mureena student newspaper, we detail the structure and content of the Community Organisation Course and highlight student, administrative and government responses to it, including the Course's defunding in 1977. The majority of the 62 graduates from three annual cohorts of the course went on to create and work for Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, a success that led to the creation of another important community-based educational program, Koori Kollij, five years later
This article explores the ways that the Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan peoples of the plains and river country actively responded to smallpox, just as they actively responded to other forms of violence. Drawing on a lesser-known medical report, combined with other sources, we offer new interpretations of the responses to and impact of smallpox disease for the Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan of north-west and central western New South Wales in the period 1830-1832. Foregrounding Aboriginal responses reveals more nuanced interactions of disease and other impacts of colonisation on population. We argue the Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan peoples applied Traditional Knowledge, accepted vaccines, drew on networks across vast distances with earlier experience of the disease, along with observation and intuition, to manage the spread and impact of the disease.
John Naish, Welsh author and playwright, was ahead of his time in his condemnation of Indigenous-white relationships and in his appreciation of the reality of Indigenous dispossession in tropical north Queensland. This was a legacy that spilled over into the cane fields where, as a 10 pound assisted immigrant, Naish cut cane in the 1950s and 1960s when immigrants directed to cut cane invariably encountered people of colour. Naish was therefore uniquely placed to write critically of the racial tensions he observed in the small sugar towns and of the means used to subjugate Aboriginal people to ongoing surveillance and control. In a time before Aboriginal writers appropriated the right to speak to their own realities Naish wrote sensitively and realistically giving his Indigenous characters subversive power that challenged the white characters' assumption of rights. His works are a medium for not only understanding the past but are a mirror reflecting the uncomfortable reality of being an Indigenous person in 1950s in small town tropical north Queensland, subjected to white racism and institutionalised injustices and exploitation.
At the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology, the Pitt Rivers Museum, on open display within the section devoted to Aboriginal art, sits a New South Wales tree carving made by the Wiradjuri or Gamilaroi people, most likely a grave marker. It has no recorded provenance beyond the fact that it was found, in 1948, to have never been accessioned, and so a number was given to it. Erroneously assuming that it was one of many items left in the museum by its former curator Henry Balfour on his death in 1939, no detailed research has ever been carried out on this remarkable piece of Aboriginal cultural heritage. This article seeks to establish all the evidence that is available for the object's provenance and makes a case for a particular context in particular - as the 'tomb tablet' that was sent by the New South Wales organising committee for the Paris universal exhibition of 1867 - and thus one of the earliest and most historically significant Aboriginal artefacts from New South Wales in any European museum. Having followed the historical trail as far as can be done right now, the article concludes with some reflections on museum ethics and equitable futures and sketches a potential future for the guulany within the context of a return to Country.
This paper engages with Fourmile's seminal work, 'Who Owns the Past? - Aborigines as Captives of the Archives', to highlight and critique the colonial nature of the archives and their impacts on First Nations peoples in Australia. It outlines Fourmile's calls to action, emphasising the need for First Nations people to not only access archival materials but also exert control over them. Further, it discusses the impacts of Fourmile's work in the context of the Australian library and archives sectors to better support the information needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The paper critiques the colonial foundations of traditional library and archive practices, drawing on critical library, archive and information studies within an Indigenous research paradigm. Additionally, it explores Fourmile's vision for Living Archives on Country, centring the importance of local care and stewardship of Indigenous stories.
The south-west Queensland town of Cunnamulla has been home to the largest Aboriginal community in the region since the 1940s. This is despite the town's relatively small general population, and its construction in the national media as an emblem of outback racism and Indigenous victimhood. Recent postcolonial histories have explored the mobilities of Aboriginal peoples during the twentieth century, showing how space was used to subvert governmental control. In this article I explore the historical dynamics of movement around Cunnamulla during this period to unearth the town's unique story as the centre of a dynamic network of Indigenous mobility, primarily through its lived experience. I argue that the cause of the unprecedented number of Aboriginal inhabitants was caused by an interplay between the Cunnamulla's micro-climate of Aboriginal agency and administrative decisions made by the Queensland State Government Department of Native Affairs. Bringing this unexamined and remarkable phenomenon into focus reveals the broader story of spatial adaptability and resistance enacted by Aboriginal peoples across the region.
Late on the evening of 19 May 1951, Dr Wallman, of Maitland Hospital, was called to examine a four-year-old Aboriginal boy at Point Pearce Station on Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. He diagnosed tetanus and ordered the boy be sent immediately to Wallaroo Hospital, despite the fact there were closer hospitals at Maitland and Moonta. When he heard an Aboriginal patient was on his way, Dr Clayton, the medical officer in charge of Wallaroo Hospital, left his post, drove south and waited beside the road to block the approach of the vehicle transporting the boy. Despite this, the boy was presented to the matron of Wallaroo Hospital, who refused to admit him. When Dr Clayton returned, thwarted, well after midnight, he refused to even examine the boy, who was driven back to the station. The next morning, the boy was taken to the Adelaide Children's Hospital. He died that same day.
The Aboriginal History Archive (AHA) at Victoria University houses a vast collection of documents, music and photographs from and about Aboriginal Black Power, Land Rights and Self-Determination movements in so-called man, activist and historian Professor Gary Foley since the 1960s, the AHA has grown in size, been organised and catalogued, and is established and governed by Aboriginal people for Aboriginal people. This article outlines the content of the archive and the reflections of First Nations people and non-Indigenous people who work in the AHA. These shared insights of Foley's collaborators at the AHA into the structure, importance and personal experience of the AHA highlight its unique way of working and how it both documents and continues community know-how and political struggle.
The Aboriginal Badmardi artist Nayombolmi (c. 1895-1967) is mostly known for his extensive rock art creations. In this article, we compile and present 17 bark paintings attributed to Nayombolmi. We picture the artist's life and engagement with art collectors and tourists, especially his long-term relationship with Dorothy Bennett and her son Lance. Known artworks created on stone and bark are compared regarding painted subject matters. Our findings reveal that artworks in the stone media are more varied and mainly created for his closest family and kin, while the bark paintings created for the growing art market are found to be more homogenous. It is argued that the artist's audiences and the social context of creating the art had a major impact on what motifs Nayombolmi painted.
Archives make historical presence and absence concrete. When tangible evidence is required to prove historical injustices and facilitate reparations, an ethnographic approach for reading archival records can uncover stories and traces of people and situations that, at a glance, seem hidden beneath the ink. This is the case for the many First Nations Australian women and girls who worked as domestic servants on Queensland pastoral stations; the documentation of their work is hindered by the absence of work records, even their names, in archival collections. In this article, the authors argue that the lack of evidence of First Nations domestic workers on pastoral stations is a result of their triple exploitation: their identity as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander; second, their identity as women; and third, their location in the private sphere - a space traditionally less valued and invisible to the public eye and documentation. Following Ann Laura Stoler's ethnographic approach to archives, the authors propose a reading of pastoral station archives 'along the grain', using John Oxley Library archival material from Lammermoor, Rosella Plains and Glengallan pastoral stations as case studies. While voices are occasionally documented in the three Queensland station archives, questions, gaps and silences are numerous. Incomplete and challenging, the archive and its complexities must be studied and used to tell stories. The silence of domestic servant voices is deafening; however, the absence must also be valued as a lens for reading archival records, developing questions, and considering further research and storytelling.
This article considers the significance of Queen Elizabeth II's 1954 visit to Shepparton, Victoria, to the history and memory of Aboriginal political activism in the era of assimilation. Using oral testimony, newspaper reports, and other archival sources, I describe the visit and ponder its prominent role in Yorta Yorta storytelling, which I suggest amounts to a type of 'memory activism'. The article also discusses Victoria's dysfunctional Aboriginal policy of the 1950s, which excluded mixed-race Aboriginal communities from its purview. The visit of the Queen is remembered as a transformational moment in Yorta Yorta history and is part of a longer history of Aboriginal people's engagement with the monarchy through their activism.
First Nations perspectives on the Frontier Wars are gaining increasing interest in historical, academic, political and social spheres. The arrival of squatters and miners brought momentous change to Ewamian people in Queensland's Gulf savannah. Aboriginal resistance was followed by European reprisals, a pattern seen across Australia. A key aim of our paper is to address the dominant view of how Ewamian contact history is presented - Ewamian people did not passively accept the arrival of Europeans; the historic sources describe a resistance that continued over 35 years in three distinct phases. This paper has two aims. First, we challenge the colonial narrative that describes Ewamian as passive respondents to European colonialism. Second, we reinterpret the colonial narratives to identify three phases of resistance in the Ewamian estate in response to the changing nature of the colonial frontier in Queensland's Gulf savannah.
Mapping the history of the repatriation movement in Australia, this article will argue that the movement to repatriate Ancestral Remains was an expression of Aboriginal nation-building and self-determination. Indigenous remains were collected in Australia over at least 180 years in the name of discovery, in the purported interest of science and anthropology, as 'trophies of empire' or as 'curios' of a supposedly 'dying race'. The demand for the return of Ancestral Remains has been led by Indigenous peoples. Their abiding interest to recover Ancestors held in institutions in Australia and overseas has been a long campaign. Aboriginal organisations were a critical interface advocating the return of Ancestral Remains to government and institutions, challenging museums and applying political pressure. As Indigenous rights claims developed, the newly emerging Aboriginal forms of government made repatriation of Ancestral Remains a central focus. In asserting Indigenous power, identity reclamation and responsibility to the dead, these claims posed significant provocations to the history, role and purpose of collecting institutions. Legislative, institutional and political responses to Aboriginal claims for repatriation in Australia will be explored, as well as the current proposal to establish a National Resting Place to provide a long-term, Indigenous-centred response to the care of Ancestral Remains.
