Bøger udgivet af Melbourne University

'I had lived and hunted with these people, accompanied them on their nomadic wanderings and learned their customs and their languages with the result that I understood and believed in them and resented the injustices under which they had suffered for so long at the hands of the white man and other invaders of their territory.' In 1932-33, Yolngu people living in the Caledon Bay area of north-east Arnhem Land were involved in the killing of five Japanese fishermen and three Europeans. A punitive expedition was proposed to 'teach the Aborigines a lesson'. In response, Donald Thomson, a Melbourne-born anthropologist, offered to investigate the causes of the conflict. After seven months of investigation he persuaded the Federal Government to free the three men convicted of the killings and returned with them to their own country, subsequently spending fifteen months documenting the culture of the region. Whilst in Arnhem Land, Thomson, a superb and enthusiastic photographer, made the most comprehensive photographic record of any fully functioning, self-supporting Aboriginal society that we will ever have. The one hundred and thirty images included in this book cover domestic life, subsistence, house types, material culture, and religious life, providing a uniquely privileged glimpse of life beyond the frontier. Thomson recorded his experiences in newspaper and academic articles, private papers and extended reports to the government. Nicolas Peterson brings this material together as a compelling, highly personal narrative in Thomson's own words. It is a narrative that names all the Aboriginal people involved, presenting them as individuals in a way no other writings of the time do. Through it all Thomson's passionate commitment to Aboriginal rights as defender, critic and advocate, shines through.

It contemplates why these agreements were forged, how the Aboriginal people understood their terms, why government repudiated them, and how settlers claimed to be the rightful owners of the land. Bain Attwood also reveals the ways in which the settler society has endeavoured to make good its act of possession--by repeatedly creating histories that have recalled or repressed the memory of Batman, the treaties, and the Aborigines' destruction and dispossession--and charts how Aboriginal people have unsettled this matter of history through their remembering.

A vivid recreation of the origins of the Sydney suburb of the Rocks that illuminates the real lives of the convicts and ex-convicts in the first forty years of white settlement. The Rocks is Sydney's earliest surviving neighbourhood. Grace Karskens builds up a vivid picture of the lives of its earliest white inhabitants. A wealth of historical documents, pictures, maps and archaeological evidence allows her to recover the words and gestures, tastes and habits, aspirations and fears, of the dealers, publicans, labourers, artisans, watermen, washerwomen, servants and prostitutes who lived there. What sort of town did these people make? What did it look like? How did they treat their neighbours? And what of other human relations-how did men and women behave sexually? What did they think was 'moral' behaviour? What were their marriages like? How did they bring up their children? Grace Karskens shows it was a place very different from the usual images of a brutal 'gaol colony': it was, rather, a preindustrial town, a face-to-face society, marked more by movement and opportunity, dialogue and negotiation than by coercion, discipline and punishment.

Award-winning biography of Georgiana Huntly McCrae, illegitimate daughter of a Scottish duke, professional portrait painter in 1820s Edinburgh, and settler's wife in early Melbourne.After a childhood among artists, French émigrés and English radicals in Regency London, Georgiana lived as a young woman at her father's castle in the Highlands.A gifted portraitist, professionally trained in London, she earned her own living in Edinburgh before making the choice between marriage and a career. After marrying Andrew McCrae in 1830 she followed her husband in his erratic progress from Edinburgh to London and then to Port Phillip, where he was successively lawyer, squatter and goldfields magistrate. The varied fortunes of the McCraes are recounted in a story whose tragic elements are counter-balanced by the strength of mind, the lively wit and creativity of Georgiana.By allowing Georgiana's own voice to be heard through her letters and journals Brenda Niall has brought a legendary colonial figure into authentic vibrant life.

An absorbing and masterly account of Australia's third great hydrographer, Phillip Parker King. Phillip Parker King has been described as the greatest of Australia's early marine surveyors. But while the achievements of Cook and Flinders are widely known, this is the first telling of King's story. Unlike Cook and Flinders, King was Australian-born-the son of Philip Gidley King, governor of New South Wales. In a series of gruelling voyages between 1817 and 1822, King charted most of the north-west coast of Australia from the eastern tip of Arnhem Land all the way round to Cape Leeuwin and King George Sound. He surveyed Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen's Land and the treacherous waters inside the Great Barrier Reef, filling gaps in the work of his famous predecessors. Marsden Hordern, a splendid storyteller, creates for the reader a sense of following, engrossed, in King's wake. The hazards of reefs, shoals and tides are ever-present, as is delight in unfamiliar wildlife and curiosity about the Aboriginal people. The question left hanging is whether King might be better known today had he been a less capable, good and faithful servant of the Crown, and more inclined to the excess and ineptitude of certain other early explorers. Winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for General History. Companion volume to Mariners are Warned!, another prize-winning maritime biography by the same author.

A subtle and complex study of how a generation of activists came to reinvent themselves, and an outstanding contribution to the history of the gay movement in Australia.In the 1960s and 1970s many Australians began thinking about some radical questions. Who are we as homosexuals? Who might we become? How are we to act politically? In short, how are we to live?In lively prose Robert Reynolds looks at how these men and women undertook what is now a universal task: the reinvention of the self in an era of uncertainty and change, where old answers no longer suffice, and where sexuality is a core preoccupation. This agile account avoids simple, romantic or stereotyped views of the gay and lesbian movements to reveal a complex but largely forgotten history and legacy.Reynolds delves into personal stories, moving adroitly from the camp bars of the 1960s to the openly proud homosexuals who have created a politics of homosexuality in Australia. He presents a highly readable yet complex history in which there are no simple dualities.From camp to gay to the recent movement of queer, from modern to postmodern and a transgressive use of psychoanalysis, From Camp to Queer is a sophisticated yet highly accessible story.

Ancestral Power suggests that Aboriginal spirituality is much more complex and compelling than the early missionaries could ever have imagined.The Dreaming, or the Dreamtime, is the English translation of a complex Aboriginal religious concept. It relates to the idea of an ancestral presence which exists as a spiritual power that is deeply present in the land. This presence or power also exists in certain paintings, in some dance performances, and in songs, blood and ceremonial objects. In Ancestral Power, Lynne Hume seeks to further our understanding of human consciousness by looking through a Western lens at the concept of the Dreaming. She examines the idea that Aboriginal people may have used certain techniques for entering altered states of consciousness. Could their experiences in such states, together with their extensive knowledge of their environment, have helped to create the cosmological scheme we call the Dreaming? With these questions in mind, she brings together and examines, for the first time, a wide range of existing literature on Aboriginal cosmology and spiritual practices, together with studies of Aboriginal art, data from anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, and statements by Aboriginal people from many different regional areas of Australia. Much of the information she highlights is little known. Ancestral Power suggests that Aboriginal spirituality is much more complex and compelling than the early missionaries could ever have imagined.