AustLit

'For four decades Jeremy Beckett has shone a light on previously marginalised fields of life. While the many went in search of ‘traditional culture’, Beckett was fascinated to learn about people who often lacked wider recognition of their Aboriginality. In the process he changed our understandings and highlighted the issues those people confronted. He has enriched our appreciation of the diversity of Indigenous identities and experiences.'

'He was an expert witness leading up to the Mabo decision, and has brought Australian Indigenous studies into a world framework.' (Source: Publishers website)

'R.H.Mathews, having spent the middle years of the 19th century as a surveyor, around the age of fifty began investigating the beliefs, social organisation and languages of Aborigines. Between that time and his death in 1918 he published 171 articles in the scientific journals of Britain, the United States, Australia and (translated) of France, Austria and Germany, as well as corresponding with various well known figures in the anthropology and comparative religion of the period. He also fell into bitter controversy with the likes of Professor Baldwin Spencer and explorer, A.W.Howitt, who thought of themselves as the leading Australian based authorities on the Aborigines. (Introduction)

'The ‘Corner Country’, where Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales now converge, was in Aboriginal tradition crisscrossed by the tracks of the mura, ancestral beings, who named the country as they travelled, linking place to language. Reproduced here is the story of the two Ngatyi, Rainbow Serpents, who travelled from the Paroo to the Flinders Ranges and back as far as Yancannia Creek, where their deep underground channels linked them back to the Paroo. Jeremy Beckett recorded these stories from George Dutton and Alf Barlow in 1957. Luise Hercus, who has worked on the languages in the area for many years, has collaborated with Jeremy Beckett to analyse the names and identify the places.' (Source: Publishers website)

'WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he remains a highly significant figure in Aboriginal affairs and Australian anthropology. Educated by Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney and Malinowski in London, he undertook anthropological work in Australia, Africa and the Pacific.'

'Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aboriginal religion. His 1968 broadcast lectures, After the Dreaming, continue to be among the most widely quoted works in the field of Aboriginal studies. He also produced some exceptionally evocative biographical portraits of Aboriginal people. Stanner’s writings on post-colonial development and assimilation policy urged an appreciation of Indigenous people’s distinctive world views and aspirations.'

'Hinkson and Beckett have drawn together some of Australia’s leading academics working in Aboriginal studies to provide an historical and analytical context for Stanner’s work, as well as demonstrating the continuing relevance of his writings in the contested field of Aboriginal affairs.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'Kenneth Maddock, who died in June, was born in New Zealand. He graduated in law at Auckland University in 1960, and began practising, but made this his daytime job, while studying part-time for an MA in Anthropology. Preferring the uncertainties of a career in anthropology to a secure profession downtown, he nevertheless maintained an interest in legal anthropology, and perhaps unexpectedly spent a part of the final decade of his career as an expert witness in court cases concerned with Aboriginal issues.' (Introduction)

'Until the 1970s, Aboriginal people in Australia were virtually without a voice. Administrators, missionaries, scientists, novelists, spoke of them, and occasionally for them, with such authority as to make a native voice seem unnecessary, even impossible. It was as though Aborigines were incapable of articulating their hopes and their history. The last twenty five or so years, whatever their disappointments, have seen the creation of a public space within which Aboriginal people could speak to other Australians and to one another. The faces of several Aboriginal spokesperson; have become familiar to television viewers, and Aboriginal writers, painters, and playwrights have found a sizeable audience, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. But an older and less educated generation has also been able through the use of a tape recorder and an editor to collect their memories and tell their stories to the world at large. Sally Morgan's My Place (1987) tells how a young Aboriginal graduate of the 1970s, enabled her mother and grandmother to confront their lives and articulate their Aboriginality. . . ' (Introduction)
 

 'Aboriginal voices are often heard these days, including singers and song makers. Yothu Yindi is a household name, and the likes of Archie Roach and Kevin Carmody are well known. Until the late 1960s Aboriginal people were mostly spoken for, and, although Harold Blair and Jimmy Little were known as Aboriginal singers, they did not sing many Aboriginal songs. When in 1965 the Australian folk label, Wattle, issued Dougie Young's The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards' and drinking songs such as 'Cut a Rug7 and 'Pass Him the Flagon', they were something of a novelty. But the poor quality of the recordings, weak distribution, and the musical tastes of the times - folk and rock, but certainly not country - all worked against them catching on.' ( (Publication abstract)

'The setting of this chapter is the far west of New South Wales of the late 1950s, a region of semi-arid plains, mainly given over to sheep grazing and supporting only a sparse population. The region's only large town is Broken Hill, a mining centre of about 30,000 inhabitants; the rest are small commercial and servicing centres for the pastoral hinterland: only Bourke, Cobar and Condobolin exceed 2,000, while the three townships of the Corner (the extreme northwest of the State), together boast no more than 250, East of the Bogan and south of the Lachlan Rivers, sheep grazing gradually gives way to wheat farming, while at Mildura and Griffith there is fruit growing, The population of these areas is less sparse and the towns are larger; however, they figure only marginally in the present account.'  (Introduction)

'The Torres Strait Islanders are Australia's 'other' indigenous minority. Their experience of colonialism and reaction to their position in Australian society provides a striking counterpoint to that of the Aborigines. The author applies many years of study and work among the Torres Strait Islanders to provide a new account of their changing world in the islands and their changing role in Australia.

'A Melanesian people, the Torres Strait Islanders' cultural affinities originally lay with the Papuans to the north rather than the Aborigines to the south. But by the logic of European colonialism, they were made a part of the State of Queensland. The pearling industry has exploited their labour, but left them in occupation of their islands. The Queensland government has allowed them a degree of autonomy in local affairs which many would contrast with its approach to Aborigines.

'The Torres Strait Islanders have thus had the space in which to develop a rich and vital way of life that they still call 'island custom', which has, however, changed from that described in the classic anthropological research begun by A. C. Haddon just a hundred years ago. This provided the starting point for Dr Beckett, who has studied and worked with Torres Strait Islanders since the 1950s, and this book links the personal experience of the author, the professional insights of the anthropologist, and the perceptions of past and present held by the Islanders themselves.

'The author has examined the move to the mainland of many Islanders searching for new opportunities, but re-creating island custom in the new setting. He demonstrates in this book the attempts of the Islanders to win a more favourable place inAustralian society, challenging European authority. The book examines colonialism in its various manifestations, and the ways, political and cultural, in which the colonized mediate its effects. Through the concept of 'welfare colonialism' Islander affairs are located in the broader context of state intervention and redistribution. The experience of the Torres Strait Islanders thus provides a new way of looking at the contemporary situation of Australian Aborigines and other minority groups enmeshed in the changes of the advanced Western world.'   (Publication summary)