AustLit

'Since 2011 an unofficial ‘lest we forget the frontier wars march’ has taken place in Canberra: Aboriginal and nonAboriginal supporters march in the wake of the official Anzac parade carrying placards and banners recording massacre sites throughout Australia. This march has taken shape at a time when the Australian War Memorial (AWM) has rejected calls to acknowledge Australia’s colonial frontier wars, and this in the context of a major shift in the meaning of Anzac commemoration.' (Introduction)

'The 1970s saw the battle for Aboriginal people’s struggles for recognition of their postcolonial rights. Rural communities, where large Aboriginal populations lived, were in foment as a consequence of political, economic and major structural change, social fragmentation and unparalleled unemployment. The ensuing so-called riots, protests and law-and-order campaigns captured much of the tense relations that existed between Indigenous people, the police and the criminal justice system.'

'In Protest land rights and riots, Barry Morris shows how those policies, informed by neoliberalism, targeted those who were least integrated socially and culturally and who enjoyed fewer legitimate economic opportunities.'

'Amidst intense political debate, struggle and conflict, new forces were unleashed as a post-settler colonial state grappled with its past. Morris captures the contradictory forces and provides a social analysis of the ensuing political effects of neoliberal policy and the way it was subsequently undermined by an emerging new political orthodoxy in the 1990s.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'For the Dhan-gadi people of the Macleay Valley, European domination has been a constant feature of their lives since occupation of the valley in the mid nineteenth century, The historical specificities of this colonial domination-the kinds of Aboriginal-European interaction and the mechanisms of cultural, political and economic subordination-have changed continually through time. The aim of this chapter is to examine one of these moments of domination, It explores the way a changing configuration of power has in part structured Dhan-gadi responses, while itself being subject to subversion by continuous attempts by the Dhan-gadi to resist incorporation into an encompassing state system. In the period I am considering, namely the era 1936-68, during which the Aborigines were subject to Institutionalisation, one sees the emergence of subtle, non-violent forms of resistance.' (Introduction)