Laura Rademaker

Language and Australian Aboriginal History Anindilyakwa and English on Groote Eylandt

The survival of the Anindilyakwa language of Groote Eylandt on its encounter with English is a story of Aboriginal people’s adaptability and perseverance in the face of alternate visions for their island. When the Church Missionary Society arrived and, with Anindilyakwa people, established the Angurugu mission, an ongoing tension began over which language would be the language of the land: English or Anindilyakwa? This article argues that, since that time, Anindilyakwa people have used strategies of both accommodation and strategic resistance to maintain the strength of their language, compelling even missionaries and government to adapt to Anindilyakwa interests. Australia’s language histories such as this have implications for historians as they consider whose languages they listen to and remember. For historians, part of the ongoing process of reconciliation will be using Aboriginal languages as well as acknowledging and incorporating the stories of Australia’s languages in their work. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Mythologies of Nation-Building in Australia Today

Mythologies of Nation-Building in Australia Today Carolyn Holbrook , Julie Kimber , Maggie Nolan c and Laura Rademaker d Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia; Faculty of Health, Arts & Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University, Banyo, QLD, Australia; Institute for Religion & Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University, Strathfield, NSW, Australia

Voices from the Community: Reimagining the Past

Many of the articles in this issue of Journal of Australian Studies draw upon oral history and other qualitative methodologies. This process of listening carefully to the stories people tell about their lives is one of the most important ways an interdisciplinary journal such as this contributes to sharing ideas and histories that help us make sense of our worlds. Often these approaches accompany a reimagining of traditional historical practice. Kieran Dolin’s article reflects on histories of inscription in Western Australia, deconstructing the process by which settler law was inscribed on “new lands”, overwriting existing Indigenous knowledge. In his meditation on Anne Neil’s sculpture, Memory Markers, Dolin both frames writing as a “technology of jurisdiction” and explores how members of Perth’s Indigenous community have turned the pen against the Western “scriptural economy” and documented the survival of their stories within the city’s juridical order. Ashley Barnwell and Joseph Cummins also explore relations between Indigenous and settler Australians by considering Andrew McGahan’s 2004 novel, White Earth, through the lens of family history. They suggest that literature is an important site for reckoning with the violent foundations of the nation. For Barnwell and Cummins, the novel offers a means of reflecting on how uncovering knowledge of family secrets leads to an understanding of the conflicted and complex relationship of white Australians to the land and its Indigenous inhabitants. The role of reading is also central to Robert Clarke, Nicholas Hookway, and Rebekah Burgess’s report on a fascinating survey on the importance of book clubs in the cultural and community life of a regional area of northern Tasmania. Contrary to claims that communities are weakening in contemporary Australia, Clarke, Hookway, and Burgess show that book clubs play significant intellectual, social, and communitarian functions that make them worth promoting in regional parts of the country. Carla Pascoe turns to oral histories and popular magazines to find out what their houses meant to 1950s Australians. Architects envisaged modernist designs would enable new domestic efficiency with open kitchens, for example, allowing housewives to simultaneously manage children and dinner. Yet Pascoe finds Australians often disliked “modern” ways of using space and inhabited them differently than how their designers had intended. For most, however, living in “modern” houses was neither a financial nor social possibility. Oral history is also central to Bobbie Oliver’s article, a reflexive exploration of the value of creating people’s history—history that empowers its subjects by giving voice not only to how evidence might be shaped, but to how it is gathered, and the forms that it may take. Through her industrial case studies—the Midland Railway Workshops and the East Perth

‘Only cuppa tea Christians’: colonisation, authentic indigeneity and the missionary linguist

Abstract ‘Cuppa tea Christians’ were Aboriginal people whose faith was supposedly only as deep as their desire for a cuppa. At the Church Missionary Society of Australia’s Angurugu mission to Anindilyakwa people in the Northern Territory, missionaries in the 1960s suspected that most ‘conversions’ were only shallow. This article examines the long association in English speakers’ minds of Aboriginal cultures with insincerity or fakery. I argue that the prevalence of Anindilyakwa ‘backsliding’ at the mission in the 1960s pushed missionaries to search for new approaches to know for sure who, if anyone, was sincerely converted. Language became the key for missionaries to speak directly to Aboriginal hearts and know the Aboriginal mind, based on an assumption that Aboriginal people were only authentic when speaking their own languages. Although missionary linguistic projects tended towards impulses to ‘colonise Indigenous consciousness’, Anindilyakwa people managed this project, as well as working out their own diverse responses to the missionaries’ gospel. This article has been peer reviewed.

Religion for the Modern Girl: Maude Royden in Australia, 1928

ABSTRACT When the feminist preacher Maude Royden (1876–1956) toured Australia in 1928, she promoted modern religion for modern women. This article examines the Australian press coverage of Royden’s visit to shed light on the complex relationships between religion, modernity and the female body as they were constituted in Australia in the 1920s. In doing so, this article contributes to growing historiographic debate concerning the intersections of modernity and religion and serves to disrupt further those narratives which have presumed processes of modernisation and secularisation to be running in parallel. Australian newspapers eagerly spread the news of Royden assuming the previously masculine space of the pulpit and they promoted her new form of Christianity as scientifically credible and suited to modern Australia women’s lives. In advancing my analysis, I also compare Royden’s press reception in Australia to that of her contemporary, Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944). McPherson likewise also offered a religious response to modernity and a new religious femininity, but the Australian media showed comparatively little interest in her visit. I argue that although religious femininities were being recrafted for modernity in the pages of Australian newspapers, only certain expressions of religiosity and modern femininity were considered compatible.