AustLit

'These three books add to a growing scholarly literature on white peoples’ involvement in and support for Aboriginal rights and welfare in Australia. Indeed, scholarship on humanitarian whiteness in Australia is perhaps the most developed of all the settler contexts in which minority Indigenous peoples’ welfare, rights, and sovereignty are at issue. Why this might be the case is not directly addressed by any of these authors but would be worth thinking about comparatively in future studies. Further, in Australia, scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives have engaged the study of whiteness and white peoples’ involvement in Aboriginal issues. The first two books discussed in this review are histories of the mid-twentieth century, based in archival research and existing historical scholarship. The third is an ethnography drawing on the anthropologist’s own experience as a medical doctor in northern Australia in the early 2000s, and engaging with scholarship in postcolonial and critical whiteness studies. Read together, the three books suggest intriguing changes in the meaning, framing, and performance of humanitarian (or, later, anti-racist) whiteness over the course of the twentieth century in Australia.'  (Introduction)

"The Land Is Our History tells the story of indigenous legal activism at a critical political and cultural juncture in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the late 1960s, indigenous activists protested assimilation policies and the usurpation of their lands as a new mining boom took off, radically threatening their collective identities. Often excluded from legal recourse in the past, indigenous leaders took their claims to court with remarkable results: for the first time, their distinctive histories were admitted as evidence of their rights.

Miranda Johnson examines how indigenous peoples advocated for themselves in courts and commissions of inquiry between the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, chronicling an extraordinary and overlooked history in which virtually disenfranchised peoples forced powerful settler democracies to reckon with their demands. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with leading participants, The Land Is Our History brings to the fore complex and rich discussions among activists, lawyers, anthropologists, judges, and others in the context of legal cases in far-flung communities dealing with rights, history, and identity. The effects of these debates were unexpectedly wide-ranging. By asserting that they were the first peoples of the land, indigenous leaders compelled the powerful settler states that surrounded them to negotiate their rights and status. Fracturing national myths and making new stories of origin necessary, indigenous peoples' claims challenged settler societies to rethink their sense of belonging"–Provided by publisher.