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Farmers or Hunter-gatherers?
Australians’ understanding of Aboriginal society prior to the British invasion from 1788 has been transformed since the publication of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu in 2014. It argued that classical Aboriginal society was more sophisticated than Australians had been led to believe because it resembled more closely the farming communities of Europe. In Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe ask why Australians have been so receptive to the notion that farming represents an advance from hunting and gathering. Drawing on the knowledge of Aboriginal elders, previously not included within this discussion, and decades of anthropological scholarship, Sutton and Walshe provide extensive evidence to support their argument that classical Aboriginal society was a hunter-gatherer society and as sophisticated as the traditional European farming methods. Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? asks Australians to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal society and culture.
Dark Emu
Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing - behaviors inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.
The Making and Unmaking of East-West Link
For some years, Melbourne's aborted East-West Link created intense picketing and protests, multiple court challenges, breathless media coverage and bitter politicking. The Link brought the downfall of the single-term Baillieu-Napthine Liberal government; its cancellation cost the state half a billion dollars; and it lives on in infamy, a byword in the Australian lexicon for political brinkmanship, waste and politicisation of infrastructure. In The Making and Unmaking of East-West Link, James C Murphy explores the saga from competing vantage points, detailing the layers of politics and intrigue that saturate infrastructure policymaking in Australia.
Culturing the Body
The human body is both the site of lived experiences and a means of communicating those experiences to a diverse audience. Hominins have been culturing their bodies, that is adding social and cultural meaning through the use pigments and objects, for over 100,000 years. There is archaeological evidence for practices of adornment of the body by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hominins, including personal ornaments, clothing, hairstyles, body painting, and tattoos. These practices have been variously interpreted to reflect differences such as gender, status, and ethnicity, to attract or intimidate others, and as indices of a symbolically mediated self and personal identity. These studies contribute to a novel and growing body of evidence for diversity of cultural expression in the past, something that is a hallmark of human cultures today.
The Politics of Suffering
Peter Sutton is a fearless and authoritative voice in Aboriginal politics. In this groundbreaking book, he asks why, after three decades of liberal thinking, has the suffering and grief in so many Aboriginal communities become worse? The picture Sutton presents is tragic. He marshals shocking evidence against the failures of the past, and argues provocatively that three decades of liberal consensus on Aboriginal issues has collapsed. Sutton is a leading Australian anthropologist who has lived and worked closely with Aboriginal communities. He combines clear-eyed, original observation with deep emotional engagement. The Politics of Suffering cuts through the cant and offers fresh insight and hope for a new era in Indigenous politics.
Memory, Place and Aboriginal-Settler History
Taking the absence of Aboriginal people in South Australian settler descendants’ historical consciousness as a starting point, 'Memory, Place and Aboriginal–Settler History' combines the methodologies and theories of historical enquiry, anthropology and memory studies to investigate the multitudinous and intertwined ways the colonial past is known, represented and made sense of by current generations. Informed by interviews and fieldwork conducted with settler and Aboriginal descendants, oral histories, site visits and personal experience, Skye Krichauff closely examines the diverse but interconnected processes through which the past is understood and narrated. 'Memory, Place and Aboriginal–Settler History' demonstrates how it is possible to unsettle settler descendants’ consciousness of the colonial past in ways that enable a tentative connection with Aboriginal people and their experiences.
First Knowledges Innovation
Deeply insightful, sensitive and passionate. An inspiring, meticulous picture of the innovations that have made us the world's oldest living culture.' - Larissa Behrendt 'Another fascinating volume in this landmark Australian publishing series.' - Richard Flanagan What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. First Nations Australians are some of the oldest innovators in the world. Original developments in social and religious activities, trading strategies, technology and land-management are underpinned by philosophies that strengthen sustainabil...
Dreaming Ecology
In the author’s own words, Dreaming Ecology ‘explores a holistic understanding of the interconnections of people, country, kinship, creation and the living world within a context of mobility. Implicitly it asks how people lived so sustainably for so long’. It offers a telling critique of the loss of Indigenous life, human and non-human, in the wake of white settler colonialism and this becoming ‘cattle country’. It offers a fresh perspective on nomadics grounded in ‘footwalk epistemology’ and ‘an ethics of return sustained across different species, events, practices and scales’. ‘This is the final and most substantial of Debbie’s love letters to the Aboriginal people of...
Fettered Frontier
Historian Jennifer Harrison’s latest book Fettered Frontier, Founding the Moreton Bay Settlement 1822–1826, a companion volume to Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay 1826 –1839 (2016) investigates the struggle to locate and establish an outpost in remote Moreton Bay. She uses original government correspondence, diaries, journals and maps and also examines the many mangled foundation stories from the time of the original site at Redcliffe and its removal to a location on the Brisbane River. The search for the river involved several exploratory voyages, the discovery of convict timber getters who had totally lost their bearings and the helpful local Aboriginal people. The stream, shrouded by mangroves, was finally discovered. A significantly sized waterway, it was appropriately named for Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane as was the campsite on its bank. Much research has concentrated on accurately re-creating economic, climatic and legal back stories together with defining the characters who made the decisions in London, Port Jackson (Sydney) and locally as well as the convicts who undertook the heavy manual work. Happy 200th Birthday, Brisbane — you have come a long way.
The Five-Million-Year Odyssey
"Human beings are incredibly diverse, from appearance and language to culture. How do we understand this diversity as a product of evolution and migration over millions of years? In this book, Peter Bellwood brings together biology, archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology to provide a sweeping look at human evolution from 5 million years ago to the rise of agriculture and civilization, presenting modern human diversity as a product of the shared history of human populations around the world. Bellwood opens the book by explaining what allows us to understand and reconstruct the human past, including the importance of archaeological, biological, and cultural approaches as well as an underst...
