Australian Aboriginal Studies: Issue 2, 2015
Major articles
Post-normal reconciliation — using science to reframe the reconciliation agenda
Kerry Arabena
A new way of considering reconciliation is explored in this work. Converging wisdom from Indigenous peoples’ philosophic traditions with Earth system, environmental, quantum and ecological sciences provides new opportuni¬ties for considering our human role and place in the living systems that give us life, context and meaning.
Early encounters in Aboriginal place: the role of emotions in French readings of Indigenous sites
Shino Konishi
This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the history of cross-cultural encounters. Rather than focusing on face-to-face interactions, it examines how emotions governed European engagements with Aboriginal cultural landscapes and shaped Europeans’ imaginings of how places could be constituted as sacred. It looks specifically at the writings of François Péron, one of the scientific crew of the Baudin expedition, a French Revolutionary voyage that visited Australia and Timor between 1801 and 1803. During the exploration of Australia the French expedition discovered two Aboriginal places that were inter-preted as religiously significant to the local people: a grove discovered at Geographe Bay in the south-west of Australia and two tombs found at Maria Island off the south-east of Tasmania. Péron’s extended discussion of these Aboriginal sites high¬lights the significance of emotions in the construction of ethnographic accounts, as well as the role of emotions in transcultural perceptions of place.
Aboriginal Task Force: Australia’s first national program dedicated to transitioning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into university education
Sue Anderson
In 1973 the Aboriginal Task Force was formed in the South Australian Institute of Technology to provide Indigenous South Australian welfare workers with qualifications commensurate with the duties they were already performing in the workforce. It was so successful that the program quickly expanded into a national Aboriginal-focused tertiary education facility that was the forerunner of the University of South Australia’s David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research (DUCIER) and the model for other Australian univer¬sity Indigenous centres. To commemorate DUCIER’s twenty-first anniversary and the fortieth anniversary of the Task Force, in 2013 a team of DUCIER academics began researching this history in order to showcase the outstanding achievements of the alumni and staff of the Task Force. Central to the research is the collection of oral histories from participants. These are being recorded through either (or both) audio and video media, with segments being used in an exhibition. Oral history is considered imperative to the project because a history taken solely from the scant archival records will not reflect the processes involved in the program’s develop¬ment, nor the impact of the Task Force on the lives of those who contributed to the program and benefited from it. These issues are discussed in relation to the first years of the Task Force program.
It all comes down to ticking a box: collecting Aboriginal identification in a 30-year longitudinal health study
Sophie Hickey
This paper explores the collection of Aboriginal identification within a longitudinal health study that has continued though decades of socio-political change. The Mater – University of Queensland Study of Pregnancy is a birth cohort study that commenced in Brisbane in the early 1980s. Until 2014 it relied on mother-reported race-based categories at baseline to determine Indigenous status. Thirty study-children (now adults) who were originally identified as having a parent who was an ‘Australian Aborigine’ were followed up 30 years later. Only 15 of this group self-identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. Considering recent studies have shown Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are increasingly more likely to self-identify as such, an archival investigation of the original ques¬tionnaires was undertaken to check for systematic miscodes. Handwritten mark¬ings on the original questionnaires showed that group affiliation cannot always be easily classified into imprecise race-based categories. To do so ignores the reality and complexities of a lived cultural identity, including multiple ethnicities or ances¬tries. This paper takes a sociological approach to explore some of the difficulties in attempting to capture ethnic identification in administrative datasets.
Tobacco use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students: understanding ‘the social’ and the effects of indigeneity
Toni Schofield, Tarunna Sebastian, Michelle Donelly and Craig Anderson
Australian tobacco use and its social acceptance have declined significantly (AIHW 2014). The rates of smoking among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, however, disclose only a very small decrease, and mortality and morbidity rates attributed to tobacco use continue to be higher for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people than they are for other Australians. The lack of any significant reduction in smoking among Indigenous Australians is especially marked among young people, who are reported to smoke daily at more than double the rate of their non-Indigenous counterparts (AIHW 2014). This paper analyses prevailing approaches to ‘the social’ in causing smoking among Indigenous Australians and argues that such approaches provide a limited foundation for understand¬ing tobacco use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in general, and among students of high school age in particular. The paper proposes a critical sociological approach that represents and understands tobacco use as an embodied, collective social practice that persists or ceases according to the opportunities aris¬ing in the lives of those engaged in the practice. Such opportunities, we propose, are not random but, rather, socially structured. In other words, they arise from the ‘sediments of past collective practice’ (Schofield 2015:31) and are identifiable as patterns over time. In the case of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including those of high-school age, we propose that the dominant social structure or dynamic is that of indigeneity (Schofield and Gilroy 2015). We argue that smoking cessation programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students need to have a coherent conceptual foundation that includes the adoption of Indigenous research to inform policy development and implementation.
Research reports
Aboriginal football and the Australian game
Barry Judd and Tim Butcher
This paper introduces an Australian Research Council research project currently being undertaken at the remote Aboriginal community of Papunya in the Northern Territory. The project, led by Barry Judd and Tim Butcher from RMIT University, explores the role organised Australian Football plays in commu¬nity wellbeing in a remote community. While mainstream narratives of sport view wellbeing as a natural outcome of participation in organised competition, this project critically interrogates the positive outcomes assumed in this relationship. The authors argue that the promise of Australian Football to transform the lives of remote community residents in positive ways is largely false and that participation in mainstream competition in Alice Springs may be socially and economically detri¬mental to the wellbeing of the people of Papunya. The paper questions the place that Aboriginal people occupy in Australian Football and suggests that cultural identity has only a tenuous place in the sport. It explores this theme in the context of the Northern Territory Emergency Response, or ‘Intervention’, which has posi¬tioned remote community residents as unwanted outsiders in Alice Springs and other ‘white’ spaces in the Northern Territory. It further argues that these issues are of national significance and that the treatment of Australian Football League star Adam Goodes underlines sport’s limitations in delivering wellbeing to Aboriginal peoples and their communities.
Bringing back the Ngunawal language
Doug Marmion
This paper reports on a project at AIATSIS to revive the Ngunawal language of the Canberra and nearby New South Wales region. This project is grounded in a close collaboration with a group of representatives from the Ngunawal commu¬nity, who drive all aspects of the project. While still in its early days, the project has produced valuable outcomes both in terms of the language work carried out and the collaborative research process that has underpinned these outcomes.