Ann McGrath

'Jumping around': exploring young women's behaviour and knowledge in relation to sexual health in a remote Aboriginal Australian community

Sexual health indicators for young remote-living Aboriginal women are the worst of all of Australian women. This study aimed to describe and explore young womens behaviour and knowledge in relation to sexual health, as well as to provide health professionals with cross-cultural insights to assist with health practice. A descriptive ethnographic study was conducted, which included: extended ethnographic field work in one remote community over a six-year period; community observation and participation; field notes; semi-structured interviews; group reproductive ethno-physiology drawing and language sessions; focus-group sessions; training and employment of Aboriginal research assistants; and consultation and advice from a local reference group and a Cultural Mentor. Findings reveal that young women in this remote community have a very poor biomedical understanding of sexually transmitted infections and contraception. This is further compounded by not speaking English as a first language, low literacy levels and different beliefs in relation to body functions. In their sexual relationships, young women often report experiences involving multiple casual partners, marijuana use and violence. Together, the findings contribute to a better understanding of the factors underlying sexual health inequity among young Aboriginal women in Australia.

Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative

This interview took place in a back room of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co op, Abercrombie St, Sydney, on the 10th February, 1995, surrounded by easels and half-complete works of art, the paint smell bringing back all the fond memories of working with paint. The first time I visited Boomalli was to choose a work for the cover of a forthcoming book on Aboriginal history. Hetti told me this was the room the artist, Harry Wedge, used for a studio. Hetti, who I had first met as an undergraduate student at the University of New South Wales some years ago, was now about a month off having her third child. I had not met Brenda before, but had heard of her as a key figure in the NSW art world.

Is history good medicine

Australian historians tend to assume that history is good medicine for the wider community, offering beneficial results for the social well-being of a nation, if not the globe. This article calls for this claim to be tested. It examines the pain of history lessons for Indigenous Australians, and, looking beyond the National Apology of 2008, it considers the role that historians might play in developing collaborative approaches to address the crisis of Aboriginal health and social well-being.

The Loneliness of the Feminist Historian

Abstract Feminist historians in Australia have achieved the critical mass that means that they no longer need to be the sole womans voice pleading to get women into the history corridors and inside the books. By looking back at recent history reflexively, this article celebrates the achievement of feminist historians over the past four decades in making profound impacts on mainstream historical writing and understanding. Engaging in particular with the work of feminist historians Joan Scott and Joy Damousi, ‘The Loneliness of the Feminist Historian’ considers whether feminist history has a future. It also reflects upon the authors memories of the feminist history movement from the 1970s and 1980s—its aims, its achievements and its significant successes, especially compared with other social science disciplines. It explains how certain ‘great (female) historians’ made courageous efforts to internationalise and pluralise feminist history. It also probes the meaning and relevance of ‘professional masculinities’, pointing out that feminist historians were supported by key male historians, who backed them in gaining career and publishing opportunities. Additionally, the challenges of Indigenous scholars led to a sharpening of critical approaches to colonialism. This article argues, however, that feminist historians cannot afford to cling to the excitement of the early conferences of the 1970s and 1980s, for if they expect their practice to thrive, they must constantly critique it, using the most innovative and best tools of our era, including the empirical, the reflexive, the whimsical and the theoretical.

The Big QuestionCanada: Crime and Restorative JusticeKenya: Criminalizing PastoralistsAustralia: Abiding InjusticeChile: Land Reclamation is Not Terrorism: What Legacies of Colonialism Prevent Indigenous Peoples from Achieving Justice?

Colonialism continues to obstruct Indigenous people’s quest for justice. In Canada, an estimated 150,000 Native children were stolen from their families and forced into residential schools. Designed to “kill the Indian and save the man,” these institutions isolated kids from their cultures and communities. Under this policy, Indigenous children often experienced sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, and were subjected to torture and medical experimentation, including studies on the effects of starvation. Canada’s last residential school closed in 1996, but both survivors and their families live with the persisting trauma. One legacy of the policy is a disproportionately high number of Indigenous people entangled in the criminal justice system. The harshest punishments fall on the most vulnerable in society, particularly minorities like First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Those found guilty of a crime pay a steep price for their actions even after exiting a court or a jail, affecting not only their own lives but also the well-being of their communities. To limit the damage, many have called for a penal code that takes into account the severity of crimes committed and individuals’ criminal histories, and incorporates input from offenders’ support networks, like social workers and health-care providers. Following a Supreme Court ruling in 2012, courts in Canada are obliged to consider the impact of the life circumstances of Indigenous defendants during sentencing. The Gladue principle, named after an earlier case involving an

Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth Century Imperial World by Adele Perry (review)

Colonial Relations provides a detailed appraisal of the intriguing and unusual history of an iconic Canadian family. By tracing the DouglasConnolly clan, Adele Perry goes wider, mapping the circulation of societies across changing political and imperial landscapes. The key characters, James Douglas and Amelia Connolly Douglas, bring into conversation the histories of Creole people from the plantation world of Demerara, Guyana, and the bourgeois Metis people of the Canadian fur trade. ‘‘A creole sort of colonizer,’’ James Douglas played key roles in a society with a large Indigenous population that moved from the authority of the Hudson Bay Company to a more complex settlergoverned society (180). It was not unusual for a man in the Hudson Bay Company to marry an Indigenous or Metis woman from the region. It was more unusual for him to be openly married to her when his station rose to that of governor, the highest local colonial authority. It was more unusual again that his racial origins likely included a mixed Caribbean ancestry. Starting with a consideration of how James Douglas is key to the memory fabric of both Guyana and Canada, aided by archive stories from three continents, Perry unravels mythology. The chapters are structured according to categories of people. The book starts out with reflections on a variegated archive of empire and family. It moves onto the subject of housekeepers and wives and then free people and servants. It examines marital unions and the creation of family. It constantly explores relations between colony, nation, and metropole. It ends with a chapter discussing strategic marriage strategies and stories of descendants.

Paperbark and Pinard:: A historical account of maternity care in one remote Australian Aboriginal town

BACKGROUND AND AIM Maternity care in remote areas of the Australian Northern Territory is restricted to antenatal and postnatal care only, with women routinely evacuated to give birth in hospital. Using one remote Aboriginal community as a case study, our aim with this research was to document and explore the major changes to the provision of remote maternity care over the period spanning pre-European colonisation to 1996. METHODS Our research methods included historical ethnographic fieldwork (2007-2013); interviews with Aboriginal women, Aboriginal health workers, religious and non-religious non-Aboriginal health workers and past residents; and archival review of historical documents. FINDINGS We identified four distinct eras of maternity care. Maternity care staffed by nuns who were trained in nursing and midwifery serviced childbirth in the local community. Support for community childbirth was incrementally withdrawn over a period, until the government eventually assumed responsibility for all health care. CONCLUSIONS The introduction of Western maternity care colonised Aboriginal birth practices and midwifery practice. Historical population statistics suggest that access to local Western maternity care may have contributed to a significant population increase. Despite population growth and higher demand for maternity services, local maternity services declined significantly. The rationale for removing childbirth services from the community was never explicitly addressed in any known written policy directive. Declining maternity services led to the de-skilling of many Aboriginal health workers and the significant community loss of future career pathways for Aboriginal midwives. This has contributed to the current status quo, with very few female Aboriginal health workers actively providing remote maternity care.

Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand.

minutely. The book sustains this minute empiricism over enormous temporal and geographical scale—another great achievement. Douglas and Finnane trace the gap between the fiction of sovereignty and the messiness of jurisdictional practice in every mainland colony and state of Australia. They put important new research from Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory into dialogue with better mined material from New South Wales and Victoria—a feat seldom achieved by scholars of indigenous law and governance. They also quietly fold in research on Africa and the Pacific Islands, adding important insights about the ubiquity of tempered legal pluralism in the British Commonwealth. The only slightly disappointing chapter in the book, for me, was ‘Equality before the Law’—dealing with the impact of assimilation policy in the 1950s. Here only Justice Kriewaldt and the Northern Territory are examined. The chapter focuses a little too closely on Kriewaldt’s oft-repeated ambivalence and does not give enough information about what happened to Aboriginal defendants before his courts. It also misses an important opportunity to demystify the practice and policy of other states in a decade seriously neglected by scholars. This may simply reflect the failings of the archive. Mid-twentieth-century court records are notoriously poorly preserved. While I am quibbling, I should also note my disappointment with the absence of footnotes. In-text referencing just could not do justice to the deep reading and research on show here, making the book less useful than it could be for scholars in the field. These are small complaints. In truth, there is nothing glib and nothing wanting in this excellent book. Like the very best histories of its genre, Indigenous Crime and Settler Law takes institutions, rules and processes seriously, always insisting that the reader grapple with the messiness and the moral complexities of Aboriginal encounters with the settler state. It constitutes a foundational contribution to the history of settler colonialism and indigenous people in Australia.

Styling pasts for presents

Style: we’d all like to have it! Here we provide you with some items for your tool-kit. The nature of your prose, the often intuitive devices that shape the way it looks and sounds and makes sense to your reader: that’s history’s styling. Style includes voice, vocabulary, grammar, figures of speech, flow and cadence. Style is all about communication, and yet it is also something very personal. It comes from your life, and your experience as a writer. It is something quite individual, so much so that forensic linguists can identify the authors of anonymous texts from their style. While our style will change over time, we can also improve it enormously through continual practice, experimentation and reflection.

Narrative, plot, action!

Most history books are in narrative form. They tell a story, and show the movement of people and events through time. Usually, though, that is not all they do — they also offer analysis and description. Analysis helps us understand why things happened as they did; it enables us to draw conclusions and comparisons, and to make some generalisations. Description helps the reader imagine what places, things and people in the past looked like, how people moved and talked and acted, how they worked, did politics, played sport and cared for each other. Those histories that at first glance seem to be in another mode, to be non-narrative history, such as works of historical argument and large-scale generalisation, usually still have a strong component of narrative somewhere inside them.