Regina Josefa Ganter

Muslim Australians: the deep histories of contact

Abstract Muslims are now arguably the most widely debated and feared segment of the Australian community but they are also its most long-standing non-indigenous segment. In Australia we are able to draw on a long and primarily positive contact history between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians that makes nonsense of the paranoid nationalism with which the Howard government wanted to protect a way of life from ‘recent invaders’. There are deep histories underlying some of the highly debated ‘border control’ phenomena such the Tampa refugees and ‘Timorese poachers’. The way we understand our histories also shapes the way in which we can imagine our futures and the fantasy of a white Australian history does not stand up to historical investigation.

Letters from Mapoon: Colonising aboriginal gender∗

Much information on traditional indigenous society in Australian historiography and anthropology stems from the vast store of eyewitness accounts left by missionaries, settlers and government officials. How cautious does one need to be in using such material? After all that it reveals about the moral and legal universe of its writers, can it speak reliably about traditional society? This article traces the production of knowledge about indigenous gender relations at Cape York Peninsula through a lineage of sources from the 1890s to the 1990s and concludes that unless the assumptions embedded in the primary sources are clearly identified, the discourse on Aboriginal womanhood continues to be a colonising project.

Introduction: reading the lives of white mission women

In this special edition of the Journal of Australian Studies, nine contributors consider the work of missionary women of British, Irish and European origin who worked in the Australian mission field over a period from the 1860s to the 1980s. The articles were first delivered as papers at a workshop held at parliament house in Brisbane in March 2013 to mark International Women’s Day that the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Griffith University sponsored. As the organisers, we hoped that the conjunction of senior and early career historians with several missionary descendants and practitioners from inside the churches would widen discussion of an area of women’s history that warrants closer examination. Ideologically, these mission women were situated within the cultural values of a western humanitarian Christian understanding of their duties and responsibilities to their fellow human beings in non-western societies. Humanitarians across Britain’s settler and ex-settler colonies shared a commitment to defend the interests of the weak and exploited. As historians have noted, they did not necessarily oppose colonialism itself. They thought that colonisation facilitated the transmission of the Christian faith and exposed nonChristian peoples to the benign influence of the true religion. The humanitarian enterprise thus had a dual edge: it posited indigenous peoples as equal human beings in the eyes of God, but saw them as being in need of assuming their full humanity through embracing Christianity and Christian civilisation. The critical scholarly recovery of humanitarian women that emerged in western historical literature with the resurgence of the women’s movement in the 1970s has

Historicising culture: Father Ernst Worms and the German anthropological traditions

1 Worms later Anglicised his Christian name to Ernest. SAC stands for Society of the Catholic Apostolate, colloquially referred to as the Pallottines, named after their Italian founder, (Saint) Vincent Pallotti. The author acknowledges the assistance of the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship ARC FT100100364. 2 Kurt Benesch, Mission Aktuell 1/1975, in Worms, Ernst, P. (1891–1963), pp. 1–27, Zentralarchiv der Pallottinerprovinz [hereinafter ZAPP], Limburg. 3 Worms to Nekes, Broome, 22 March 1932, in Nekes, Australien B7d, l(2), ZAPP. Historicising culture: Father Ernst Worms and the German anthropological traditions1 Thanks for reminiscences and other help to Reuben Brown, Pat Engberg, Erich Kolig, Jacqie Lambert, Merrin Mason, Anthony McCardell, Kirsty Murray, Ursula Oehme, Frank Rijavec, John Stanton, Dina and Henry Thieberger (for translations) and Anthony Thomas. Parts of this work have been supported by Australian Research Council grants DP0984419 and FT140100214. Carl Georg von Brandenstein’s legacy: The past in the present

Helpers - sisters - wives: white women on Australian missions

The contribution of women to Christian missions tends to disappear in mission historiography that is focused on the allocated roles of missionaries. Looking through the eyes of male narrators at a range of Protestant and Catholic missions in different parts of Australia we can, however, decipher a pattern of the fundamental and largely unstated importance of the presence of women as knitters of family and providers of care and compassion.

Review of Ros Kidd Trustees on Trial: Recovering the Stolen Wages

William Willshire’s name is well known to any who have read much about the settlement of central Australia, for he was notorious for his role in the killing of Aborigines during the 1880s. He was the author of a number of books celebrating the colonial encounter between the civilised and the savage. Willshire was also a colonial (indeed an Australian) rarity: a policeman prosecuted for his actions in causing the death of an Indigenous person. Yet he is memorialised in the naming of Willshire Street in central Alice Springs. This outstanding study demonstrates why his story has been begging attention and why it can be read as an emblematic account of the colonial encounter. The elements of the story justify the subtitle. This is truly a history of the policing of the Australian frontier. Settlers hungry for land for their cattle advance well beyond the boundaries of effective government into territory already occupied by Indigenous peoples. As settlement becomes more permanent, cattle are killed*and sometimes settlers themselves*often in mysterious circumstances which turn out to involve significant provocations and breaches of obligation incurred by the contiguity of settlers and Aborigines. Settlers call on government to provide police to protect them; missionaries call on government to provide police to protect the Aborigines from the settlers. Government responds, with limited resources*often very limited. At Heavitree Gap near Alice Springs in 1887, five years after his first posting in the district, Willshire’s camp consisted of ‘one bough wurley, one log hut with a thatched roof, and two tents’ (42). Policing was conducted by white officers, sometimes from British military backgrounds. But Willshire was colonial bred and well educated, born into the Adelaide middle-class in 1852, the son of an immigrant London architect who ‘built a successful life in South Australia as a journalist, teacher and civil servant’ (13). This background may help explain Willshire’s drive to write, to become a self-styled interpreter of Aboriginal life and customs, and to document his own role in their subordination to the white man. The frontier conditions give him a privileged position of contact with Aboriginal lives and culture: one which, to a degree, captivates him. It also captures him in ways he scarcely understands*as the authors show, the violence of Willshire’s policing in the 1880s, dependent as he was on numerous Aboriginal troopers, also implicated him in violent vendettas being worked out in central Australian communities (8 9, 108). To a degree unprecedented in the scholarship on the frontier, Nettelbeck and Foster show how policing worked during the transition from contested sovereignty over Aboriginal land to the establishment of government authority. The explicit command or silent endorsement of police killings was being replaced by a more demanding administrative regime that frowned on this kind of violence. That achievement was contingent on geography, jurisdiction, and phase of settlement. By the 1890s, settlers wanted rations to attract Aboriginal labour instead of ammunition to repel them (112). South Australia’s responsibility for the administration of the Northern Territory explains, in part, the tensions in policing policy that led to the prosecution*unsuccessful*of Willshire in 1891 for the killing of two Aboriginal men in circumstances that had already been the subject of official inquiry by Francis Gillen. One of the founding fathers of the Commonwealth, Sir John Downer, was Willshire’s counsel. Downer’s spirited defence was scarcely necessary in a prosecution seemingly undermined by the Crown, and unlikely to succeed before a white jury on the evidence of Aboriginal witnesses. However, Willshire’s police career had reached its apogee*after this he was regarded by the police administration as damaged goods. There is another dimension to Willshire’s career, one which makes him another kind of late colonial emblem. This policeman was also an amateur ethnographer and self-styled

Book reviews : WHITE FLOUR, WHITE POWER: FROM RATIONS TO CITIZENSHIP IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA Tim Rowse Melbourne, Cambndge University Press, 1998, xviii, 255 pp.,

All historical questions in Australia are influenced by the introduction of a capitalist mode of production, argued Ann Curthoys (’Rewriting Australian History: Including Aboriginal Resistance’ Arena 1983, 62: 109). Tim Rowse has now placed the phenomenon of rationing-often cast as humanitarian intervention-in such a light. White Flour, White Power is a detailed investigation of the colonial practice of rationing in Central Australia as a fundamental instrument of