Bøger udgivet af Aboriginal Studies Press

This book presents original and provocative views on the complex and dynamic social lives of Indigenous Australians from an historical perspective. Building on the foundational work of Harry Lourandos, the book critically examines and challenges traditional approaches which have presented Indigenous Australian pasts as static and tethered to ecological rationalism.The book reveals the ancient past of Aboriginal Australians to be one of long-term changes in social relationships and traditions, as well as the active management and manipulation of the environment. It encourages a deeper appreciation of the ways Aboriginal peoples have engaged with, and constructed their worlds. It solicits a deeper understanding of the contemporary political and social context of research and the insidious impacts of colonialist philosophies. In short, it concerns people: both past and present. Ultimately, The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies looks beyond the stereotype of Aboriginal peoples as hunter-gatherers'' and charts new and challenging agendas for Australian Aboriginal archaeology.

Arthur Malcolm, a stocky Aboriginal man in a maroon Fairmont, was in tears as the cavalcade drove towards Yarrabah Aboriginal community. It was October 1985 and the Yarrabah people were cheering him as he returned to the community as their new bishop, the first Aboriginal bishop in the Anglican Church. In "White Christ, Black Cross" Noel Loos interweaves his own more than twenty years'' personal experience with Yarrabah and other Queensland Aboriginal communities along with the voices of Aboriginal people, missionaries, and those who sat in the pews and on subcommittees and Boards in the cities, removed from the reality of the missions. Loos embeds the historical influences and impacts of the missions in shaping Christianity in Aboriginal Australia in the reality of frontier violence, government control, segregation and neglect. Aboriginal people on the missions responded to white Christianity as part of their enforced cultural change. As control diminished, Aboriginal people responded more overtly and autonomously: some regarding Christianity as irrelevant, others adopting it in culturally satisfying ways. Through the Australian Board of Missions, the Church of England sought to convert Aboriginal people into a Europeanised compliant sub-caste, with the separation of children from their families the first step. However, increasingly the Church found itself embroiled in emerging broader social issues and changing government policies. Loos believes its support of Ernest Gribble''s exposure of the 1926 Forrest River massacres indirectly set off the current ''history wars''. Nowadays, Yarrabah, one of the old mission communities, has become a centre of Christian revival, expressing an Aboriginal understanding and spirituality.

This is the first exploration of modern Australian social anthropology which examines the forces that helped shaped its formation. In his new work, Geoffrey Gray reveals the struggle to establish and consolidate anthropology in Australia as an academic discipline. He argues that to do so, anthropologists had to demonstrate that their discipline was the predominant interpreter of Indigenous life. Thus they were able, and called on, to assist government in the control, development and advancement of Indigenous peoples. Gray aims to help us understand the present organisational structures, and assist in the formulation of anthropology''s future role in Australia; to provide a wider political and social context for Australian social anthropology, and to consider the importance of anthropology as a past definer of Indigenous people. Gray''s work complements and adds to earlier publications: Wolfe''s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, McGregor''s Imagined Destinies and Anderson''s Cultivating Whiteness.

Opposition to the British colonisation of Australia did not spring from the Mabo decision or the Native Title Act, nor was it born in the vibrant 1960s, which culminated in the famous tent embassy in 1972. Rather, the first politically organised and united all-Aboriginal activist group was the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), begun in 1924 under the leadership of Frederick Maynard. For the first time Aboriginal people voiced their disapproval in public in a well-organised way. They opened offices in Sydney, held street rallies. conducted public meetings, gained newspaper coverage, wrote letters and petitions to Government at all levels, and collaborated with the international black labor movement. The AAPA''s demands resonate today. They centred on Aboriginal rights to land, stopping Aboriginal children being taken from their families, the acquisition of citizenship rights, and defending a distinct Aboriginal cultural identity. This form of resistance and organised action has now endured for more than seventy years and through a detailed exploration of the life of his grandfather, John Maynard reveals the AAPA''s invaluable legacy.