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This book provides a strikingly original explanation of the Britain's treatment of sovereignty and native title in its Australasian colonies.
'Lucid, restrained, persuasive. If there is such a thing as the history wars, then Bain Attwood has struck a major blow for the peace process. Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History is unflinchingly fair, scholarly, and refreshingly accessible.' Hugh Mackay, social researcher and author 'Genuinely good Australian history is under serious attack and Attwood's book is a brilliant battlefield analysis.' Alan Atkinson, Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow 'Hard-hitting but always thoughtful, Bain Attwood's rich, informed, and powerful book. has much to say about the centrality of history and memory to debates on the future of social justice in democratic societies.' Professor Dipe...
On 27 May 1967 a remarkable event occurred. An overwhelming majority of electors voted in a national referendum to amend clauses of the Australian Constitution concerning Aboriginal people. Today it is commonly regarded as a turning point in the history of relations between Indigenous and white Australians: a historic moment when citizenship rights -- including the vote -- were granted and the Commonwealth at long last assumed responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. Yet the constitutional changes entailed in the referendum brought about none of these things. "The 1967 Referendum" explores the legal and political significance of the referendum and the long struggle by black and white Australians for constitutional change. It traces the emergence of a series of powerful narratives about the Australian Constitution and the status of Aborigines, revealing how and why the referendum campaign acquired so much significance and has since become the subject of highly charged myth in contemporary Australia. Attwood and Markus's text is complemented by personal recollections and opinions about the referendum by a range of Indigenous people, and historical documents and illustrations.
Before 1788, the peoples of this continent did not consider themselves 'Aboriginal'. They only became 'Aborigines' in the wake of the British invasion. In this startling and original study, Bain Attwood reveals how relationships between black Australians and European colonisers determined the hearts and minds of the indigenous peoples, making them anew as Aboriginals. In examining the period after the 'killing times', this young historian provides new perspectives on racial ideology, government policy, and the rule of law. In examining European domination, he unravels the patterns of associations which were woven between European and Aborigine, and shows the complex meanings and significance...
Tells the story of Cooper and the Australian Aborigines's League, and their campaign for Aboriginal people's rights. Through petitions to government, letters to other campaigners and organisations, Thinking Black reveals their passionate struggle against dispossession and displacement, the denial of rights, and their fight to be citizens.
William Cooper’s passionate struggle against the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the denial of their rights and his heroic fight for them to become citizens in their own country has been widely commemorated and celebrated. By carefully reconstructing the historical losses his Yorta Yorta people suffered and endured, William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story reveals how the first seventy years of Cooper’s life inspired the remarkable political work he undertook in the 1930s. Focusing on Cooper’s most important campaigns-his famous petition to the British king George for an Aboriginal representative in the Australian parliament, his call for a day of mourning after 150 years of colonisation, the walk-off of the Yorta Yorta people from Cumeroogunga reserve in 1939 and his opposition to the establishment of an Aboriginal regiment in the Second World War-this carefully researched study sheds important new light on the long struggle that Indigenous people have fought to have the truth about Australia’s black history heard and win representation in Australia’s political order.
Beyond the generalisations of national and colonial history, what can we know about how Aboriginal nations interacted with the British settlers who invaded their country, the men appointed by the imperial and colonial governments to protect them, and each other? In The Good Country Bain Attwood makes a major contribution to our knowledge of this period by providing a superbly researched, finely grained local history of the Djadja Wurrung people of Central Victoria. The story is a shocking one, of destruction, decimation and dispossession, but, equally powerfully, it is not one of unceasing conflict. With reference to an unusually rich historical record, concepts such as the frontier and resistance emerge as inadequate in this context. Attwood recovers a good deal of the modus vivendi that the Djadja Wurrung reached with sympathetic protectors, pastoralists and gold diggers, showing how they both adopted and adapted to these intruders to remain in their own country, at least for a time. Finally, drawing past and present together, Attwood relates the remarkable story of the revival of the Djadja Wurrung in recent times as they have sought to become their own historians.
This book situates protection at the centre of the global history of empires, thus advancing a new perspective on world history.
The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights is the first book of its kind. Not only does it tell the history of the political struggle for Aboriginal rights in all parts of Australia; it does so almost entirely through a selection of historical documents created by the Aboriginal campaigners themselves, many of which have never been published. It presents Aboriginal perspectives of their dispossession and their long and continuing fight to overcome this. In charting the story of Aboriginal political activity from its beginnings on Flinders Island in the 1830s to the fight over native title today, this book aims to help Australians better understand both the continuities and the changes in Aboriginal politics over the last 150 years: in the leadership of the Aboriginal political struggle, the objectives of these campaigners for rights for Aborigines, their aspirations, the sources of their programmes for change, their methods of protest, and the outcomes of their protest. Through the words of Aboriginal activists, across 150 years, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights charts the relationship between political involvement and Aboriginal identity.
A comprehensive study of the struggle for basic political and social rights for Aboriginal Australians. It examines the intersections between race, history and Aboriginality, the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners, and the role of international opinion.