Alison Holland

Wives and mothers like ourselves? Exploring white women's intervention in the politics of race, 1920s‐1940s

This paper takes the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children, and the broader white anxiety over the ‘half‐caste problem’ which underpinned the policy, to explore white women reformers’ intervention in the politics of race in the years 1920–40. In these years middle‐class womens citizenship was based on maternalism and the defence of motherhood. At the same time the national feminist lobby, the Australian Federation of Women Voters, joined the public debate about the ‘Aboriginal problem’. In this context it is necessary to ask: What was the feminist view of Aboriginal womens status? Were they considered ‘wives and mothers’ like themselves, as Louisa Lawson suggested in the 1890s? What was their view of the ‘half‐caste problem’ and the ‘absorption proposal’ formulated to solve it? By asking such questions I hope to modify the current feminist historiographical view of white women reformers as ‘pro‐Aboriginal’ and ‘radical’ and their policies as challenging White Australia in these years.

Australian Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Historical Perspectives

When Australia’s Federal Liberal Government introduced the idea of a citizenship test in September 2007, it was promoted, along with changes to citizenship legislation, as a modernising project. The 2005 Citizenship Bill would replace the old Nationality and Citizenship Act (1948: hereafter, NCA) bringing it ‘into line with the reality of modern Australia’. Their discussion paper on citizenship testing, Australian Citizenship: Much More Than A Ceremony, pushed this line still further suggesting that a test represented ‘new thinking’ and a ‘fresh approach to settlement and citizenship’. Yet, during the parliamentary debates which ensued several opposition politicians saw in the new apparitions of the old, including attitudes associated with the White Australia Policy. Such difference of view reflects what Judith Brett reminds us is the partisan nature of debate about citizenship in Australia (Brett, 2001). This had remained relatively contained over the preceding two decades. There had been broad bipartisan agreement about the need to reinvigorate the language of citizenship. However, the contemporary changes were radical. The reintroduction of a formal test, some 50 years after the abolition of the last, signalled the new use to which citizenship was being put. The Federal Government wanted to use citizenship to drive unity, insisting on it being the common bond at the heart of the nation.

Compelling Evidence: marriage, colonialism and the question of Indigenous rights

In 1986 the Australian Law Reform Commission found that Aboriginal spouses who married traditionally were compellable witnesses against each other in criminal trials, despite the privileging of spouses as non‐compellable within the common law. The basis of this was that they were not recognised as husbands and wives according to the laws of evidence. The Commission argued that failure to extend the common law rule of inter‐spousal non‐compellability to traditional spouses gave the impression that the law cared only about the stability of Marriage Act (1961) marriages, despite the continuing importance of traditional marriages. This article traces a debate about the compellability of Aboriginal spouses (wives) back to 1930s and 40s Australia. Seeing this as symptomatic of the legal injustices faced by Indigenous people, humanitarians and white women reformers were calling for human rights and legal equality. Now, the Law Reform Commission is arguing that the way to ensure this is to first recognise customary law. Then, reformers came up against a bureaucracy and legal fraternity prepared to recognise neither Indigenous customary law, Indigenous women’s legal equality nor human rights.

Teaching and learning Indigenous history in comparative and transnational frame: lessons from the coalface

Abstract In first semester 2015, I taught second-year Indigenous Australian history as a comparative and transnational unit for the first time. My decision to do so related to pedagogical issues as well as developments in the field. I implemented structural changes to the way I taught the unit and refocused the content to reflect the transnational and comparative trend in the scholarship. Notwithstanding the benefits of my teaching innovations, it was the changed content that appeared to have the most educative value. Part of this was in broadening students’ understanding of Australian Indigenous history. Transferring transnational and comparative research into the classroom also helped to bring the local and global into closer connection. In this reflective piece, I look back at this learning and teaching experience. Included are the contributions of three students who undertook the unit and who flesh out the learning experience with contributions of their own.

In the Eye of the Beholder: What Six Nineteenth-Century Women Tell Us about Indigenous Authority and Identity

objects, broadly defined. There is a history of a road that ‘transported colonialism and brought people into new, not always welcome relationships’ (134). There are essays on minute books of the Māori land court, on diaries, photographs, carvings, a printing press, stamps, embroidery, slippers, toys, a memorial tree, a cottage, a piano, a medicine chest, a cannon and billies (used for making tea and cooking over fires, with recipes included). The essays trace the global flow of people, objects, technologies, print cultures, and medical and scientific knowledge. They trace colonial networks and links toChina, India, andSouth Africa.Many of the objects exhibit themingling of cultures as people shared and incorporated new materials and techniques. The slippers of celebrated Māori leader Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui are a symbol of how he blended Māori and European worlds in his own life. For the history of women, material culture history is a rich resource. Their lives emerge through objects, sometimes in unexpected places. Spinks Cottage, Wellington sheds light on the Spinks sisters and female entrepreneurship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tragedies of colonial life are illustrated in the 1869 photograph of Rachel Stewart and her baby son. He died shortly after the portrait was taken. There is a Victorian feeding bottle in the photograph, that author Alison Clarke surmises may have contributed to the death of the infant. Altogether this is an entrancing and remarkable book. It should attract a wider audience than might normally read about colonial history, and provide those who do with new lenses with which to view, refine, enrich and expand understanding and analysis.

Something Like Slavery? Queensland's Aboriginal Child Workers, 1842–1945.

among our neighbours. The real difference for us was between Catholic and Protestant, and this surely was more significant throughout Queensland than Evans allows. Peter Beattie grew up in north Queensland, and it was one of his strengths that he understood that the north was different from the rest of the state, and anywhere was a long way from Brisbane, and to us in the north, less real than Sydney. Such incomprehensible distances help to explain the outrageous gerrymander that was tolerated so long. During the second half of the twentieth century, there have been significant shifts in the value of the different regions to Queensland’s economy. Air transport has brought tourism and mineral exploration to places hitherto known only to the local Aborigines, a few old identities, or drop-outs. Queensland never had gold rushes like those in nineteenth-century Victoria, which delivered desirable immigrants and new possibilities for agriculture. In Queensland gold discoveries were sporadic, in places inaccessible to all but the most tenacious diggers who were often Chinese. Eventually with capital investment and modern technology, however, mines like Mt Morgan delivered great wealth to canny investors from ’down south’. In the twentieth century, modern minerals like oil and bauxite have attracted international investors to otherwise inaccessible localities. The availability of multinational capital to invest in Queensland has collided violently with a rising awareness that the Aboriginal people have been victims for too long. Another historical accident stemming from a decision in the early days of settlement to grant long leases rather than freehold land aggravated this clash. In 1957 in anticipation of the expiration of many ninety-nine year leases, the Liberal Country Party Nicklin government encouraged their transition to freehold. However, a huge proportion of Queensland continued as Crown lease, which not only made it easy for the government to deal directly with mining companies, but also sharpened the issue of native title in a way not experienced or probably understood elsewhere in Australia. Hand in hand with mining and tourism came developers to build access roads and provide necessary accommodation, followed naturally by demands to conserve the natural beauty that brought tourists in the first place. But tourists have brought further demands, not only for air conditioning and luxury accommodation, but, for insight into the local culture, especially Aboriginal culture. Evans is probably inclined to underestimate the role of tourism in shaking the shutters of comfortably closed minds, though it was not for want of trying to keep Japanese tourists out. Blainey speculates engagingly on the longstanding rivalry between Victoria and New South Wales, and Melbourne and Sydney especially. He also concludes wistfully that the power of Victorian liberalism in federal politics was bound to end with the re-emergence of Sydney and her strong men, Paul Keating and John Howard. So what are we to make of so many Queenslanders now in charge in Canberra? In his memoirs Peter Beattie described how he studied the history of Queensland and its Labour movement under the guidance of the late Denis Murphy and devised his reform agenda by analysing the failures of the past. It is to be hoped that the generation of Queensland politicians now in Canberra have also imbibed something of the wisdom of Murphy.

Review of Sue Taffe’s online exhibition, Collaborating for Aboriginal Rights , National Museum of Australia

Alison Holland of Macquarie University reviews the National Museum of Australia’s permanent online exhibition, Collaborating for Aboriginal Rights , researched and written by Sue Taffe, available online at http://www.nma.gov.au or http://www.indigenousrights.net.au