Gillian Cowlishaw

Black, white, or brindle : race in rural Australia

Part 1 The pastoral invasion: from rags to riches and riches to rags. Part 2 Introduction to the present: the structure of Brindleton the dominant culture beneath the surface racism.

Studying aborigines: Changing canons in anthropology and history

(1992). Studying aborigines: Changing canons in anthropology and history. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 16, Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, pp. 20-31.

Race For Exclusion

this attachment to inherited names appears much stronger as soon as we consider realities of a less material order. That is because the transformation in such cases almost always takes place too slowly to be perceptible to the very men affected by them. They feel no need to change the label, because the change of content escapes them.

Censoring Race in ‘Post-colonial’ Anthropology

This article is about an intellectual practice – the rejection of the analysis of race as an operative principle in the social world in favour of a focus on hybrid forms and flexible categories. While grounded in a worthy fear of reinforcing racial categories, there is a squeamishness here that reveals a fear of the body, and of what dealing with actual bodies might expose. Despite some intellectual labour to the contrary, this deeply embedded characteristic of liberal scholarship has restricted attention to the ubiquitous power of race and all its euphemisms as it is lived out in today’s world. I illustrate the omnipresence of race and racism and then show how the analysis of racial processes is censored. Finally I will argue for a positive evaluation of racialized bodies.

On ‘getting it wrong‘ 1 : Collateral damage in the history wars

This essay asks how the remaking of Australian history in the last quarter of the twentieth century has affected the subjectivities and social relations of people who do not make history but who must don new truths about their own past. Aboriginal people, as well as Anglo‐Australians, had to shift their consciousness as the new topic, ambiguously called ‘Aboriginal history’, burgeoned within Australian historiography. Of most significance to me is how changing judgements of the past are altering the relationships between these peoples. While the new history is seen as creating a moral challenge or burden to the nation, it is also assumed to reveal something of Aboriginal experience as colonial subjects. But historians have paid little attention to how changing social conditions have affected Aboriginal societies and the sense of self‐—and one changing social condition is the new history itself.

The Ethics of Apology: A Set of Commentaries

■ On 13 February 2008, the Australian government apologized to the ‘stolen generations’: those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed from their parents (usually their Aboriginal mothers) to be raised in white foster-homes and institutions administered by government and Christian churches — a practice that lasted from before the First World War to the early 1970s. This apology was significant, in the words of Rudd, for the ‘healing’ of the Australian nation. Apologizing for past injustices has become a significant speech act in current times. Why does saying sorry seem to be ubiquitous at the moment? What are the instances of not saying sorry? What are the ethical implications of this era of remembrance and apology? This set of commentaries seeks to explore some of the ethical, philosophical, social and political dimensions of this Age of Apology. The authors discuss whether apology is a responsibility which cannot — and should not — be avoided; the ethical pitfalls of seeking an apology, or not uttering it; the global and local understandings of apology and forgiveness; and the processes of ownership and appropriation in saying sorry.

Cultures of complaint : An ethnography of rural racial rivalry

This article was inspired by ethnographic observation of interaction, arguments and ideologies in Bourke, New South Wales, and the contrast with the nation’s public debates. Whereas the prevailing national orthodoxy accords Aborigines the status of injured victims of history, local Whites claim present injury from these same victims. The former diagnosis tends towards a dismissal of rural whitefellas’ complaints as ‘redneck’ racism, but the moral and political implications become more complicated and contentious the closer one gets to the lived realities of race relations. I argue that there is a symbolic rivalry about the contrasting moral worth of racial identities that are built around experiences of derogation and desperation. Finally I discuss two major weaknesses in our intellectual imaginations concerning the relationships between Australian citizens with Indigenous and immigrant origins.

Review article: The Aboriginal experience: A problem of interpretation

Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, RACE RELATIONS IN COLONIAL QUEENSLAND: A HISTORY OF EXCLUSION, EXPLOITATION AND EXTERMINATION, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988 (fp.1975), 450 pp.,

Feminism and anthropology

26.95. Henry Reynolds, WITH THE WHITE PEOPLE: THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF ABORIGINES IN THE EXPLOITATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF AUSTRALIA, Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1990, 288 pp.,

ON BEING AWARDED AN AUSTRALIAN PROFESSORIAL FELLOWSHIP

16.99. Jeff Collmann, FRINGE‐DWELLERS AND WELFARE: THE ABORIGINAL RESPONSE TO BUREAUCRACY, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988, 276 pp.,