Maryrose Casey

Colonists, Settlers and Aboriginal Australian War Cries: Cultural performance and economic exchange

This paper examines a traditional Aboriginal Australian genre of performance for fun, known as ‘war corroborees’. These performances along with many other genres were an important part of commercial cross-cultural entertainment in Australia in the long nineteenth century. The performance practices have received little academic attention. When they have it has been within the frame of cultural tourism. This point of reference hides the Aboriginal practices that are drawn on for these performances as well as Aboriginal agency within the practices of commercial entertainment. My aim is to examine the extant documentation from non-Aboriginal observers in the archive related to Aboriginal initiated commercial performance practices in the context of Aboriginal cultures and practices to reveal a different account of these performances.

The Great Australian Silence: Aboriginal Theatre and Human Rights

For over 200 years Aboriginal people have fought for basic rights. In their struggle, the question of cultural respect and the right to live within their own traditions and law have been critical. From the first European colonial settlements in the late eighteenth century, Aboriginal Australians were denied humanity, let alone human rights, and over time they have faced seizure of their land, forced restriction to reserves and missions as well as massacres and punitive campaigns.1 Until the late 1970s, under various government legislations, Aboriginal people were explicitly denied rights of movement, rights to own property, the right to marry, rights to free association and the right to receive wages for their work. They had no recourse when their communities were massacred or forcibly relocated and enslaved, or when women and children were kidnapped and violated. They were also denied the right to speak their languages, practise their traditional spirituality, and live by traditional law.2

Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country

of indigenous experiences, and reimagine the active part played by indigenous peoples themselves in creating, sustaining, and challenging new imperial and emerging global networks. At the same time, in their attention to each other’s contributions—marked by frequent references to the other chapters—the editors and authors model a spirit of collaboration and engagement that reflects the pioneering and agenda-setting nature of this work. That engagement also brings a liveliness and coherence to the volume that is increasingly rare in edited collections. It is thus an exemplary work on several different fronts. The first section of the book offers provocative and challenging pieces by Catherine Hall, Alan Lester and Ann Curthoys, who each draw on their own previous and important contributions to the new imperial history to explore the role played by indigenous peoples in colonial governance, humanitarian networks, and new imperial social formations at a critical moment in the expansion of the British Empire in the mid-decades of the nineteenth century. Hall pushes us to frame our histories of indigeneity alongside slavery by linking abolition with renewed settler-colonial enterprises, and a rethinking of race and hierarchies of difference that would have a profound influence across the Empire. Alan Lester zooms in to detail the negotiations between ‘assemblages’ of peoples within the Port Phillip Protectorate in southeastern Australia to probe the usefulness of older notions of indigenous resistance, and suggest more nuanced ways to detail both the influence of indigenous peoples on humanitarian thinking, as well as the emergence of new and effective indigenous politics. Similarly, Ann Curthoys charts the interplay between humanitarians and indigenous peoples as Britain passed the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850, and also suggests that while settler-controlled governments brought new challenges, indigenous peoples responded with new forms of political activism. Contributors to the second section of the book use biographical approaches to challenge some enduring myths. In lively and engaging essays, Lynette Russell, Zoë Laidlaw, Jane Lydon, Cecilia Morgan and Jane Carey all point to mobile and cosmopolitan life-histories that had deep roots in indigenous communities and their pasts. Tasmanian Aboriginal men and women who worked in the maritime industries, travellers to Britain, exchanges between northern indigenous Australians and Macassan fishermen, and Māori anthropologists, all reveal dynamic, hybrid, and ultimately modern indigenous experiences that also give the lie to British imperial foundation myths that exclude indigenous peoples. The authors also explore the complex and sometimes contradictory responses of indigenous peoples to new challenges, and admirably embrace both the creative adaptations made and the sometimes ambiguous legacies they left. That ambiguity is taken up in the third section of the book, which explores the coalescence of global indigenous networks from the late nineteenth century to the present. Here, we see indigenous peoples at work with, and against, imperial modernity, and an emerging circulation of ideas and strategies among indigenous activist networks. Spirited essays by Tony Ballantyne, Caroline Bressey, John Maynard and Ravi de Costa reveal the cracks in imperial edifices that indigenous peoples exploited, as well as the connections—and differences—between indigenous activist networks and wider colonial and anti-racist associations. The many rich essays, the insights raised, and the thought-provoking conceptual provocations in the collection—only glossed here— make this an important book. It should be read by a wide audience. In producing this volume, the editors have set an agenda for future discussion. They have also issued a challenge to imperial and transnational historians to start taking seriously indigenous peoples as dynamic and mobile historical actors. Indigenous Networks demonstrates they had and continue to have a profound influence on the making of the British imperial world—and the world in which we now live.

Ngapartji Ngapartji: Telling Aboriginal Australian Stories

Race relations in Australia, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, are a complex, contested and disturbing field. What is or is not described as Indigenous theatre continues to be contested. Questions are raised in terms of the level of Indigenous control of creative processes, theatrical form, the context of production and the inclusion of tangible markers of Indigenous cultures. Definitions of Indigenous theatre range from the inclusion of any text with Indigenous characters, regardless of the cultural heritage of the primary creators, to only theatre produced exclusively by Indigenous theatre practitioners. Then there are questions raised within these scenarios about the cultural purity of the choice of form. In this chapter, Indigenous theatre is understood as theatre work where Indigenous practitioners are primary creators with creative control over the processes and shape of the production whether wholly or partly. The focus is on the framing and reception of documentary theatre created in collaboration with Indigenous Australians.