Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia

Posted in Anthropology, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania on 2013-05-06 20:16Z by Steven

Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia

University of Western Australia Publishing
March 2006
384 pages
250 x 170 mm
Hardcover ISBN: 9781920694418

Regina Ganter, Professor, School of Humanities
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Awards

  • Won – 2007 NSW Premier’s Awards (Community and Regional History Prize)
  • Won – 2007 Ernest Scott History Prize

Australian histories too often imply that the nation’s history began in Botany Bay in 1788. But Australia was not an isolated continent, and long before white settlement, Macassan trepangers had made contact with Aboriginal people along the Northern Coastline, weaving trading networks that extended from China to the Kimberley and Torres Strait. It was this Asian–Aboriginal link that gave rise to the northern pearling industry, a subsequent driver of regional economic development.

Mixed Relations explores successive waves of contact in northern Australia and the impact of circumstances—political, legal and economic—on members of the polyethnic communities. Based on extensive fieldwork, including hundreds of interviews, it provides a fresh insight into the national narrative and poses challenging questions about the Australian identity in the twenty-first century.

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Turning Aboriginal—Historical Bents

Posted in Articles, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Oceania on 2010-11-01 22:19Z by Steven

Turning Aboriginal—Historical Bents

borderlands: e-journal
Volume 7, Number 2 (2008)
pages 1-19

Regina Ganter, Associate Professor, School of Humanities
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Under the pressures of binary identity politics the search for Aboriginal identity among people of mixed descent has become a Russian roulette that may end up with a public hanging where those with a larger public profile draw a bigger crowd. This essay explores the historical dimensions that underpin confusion and uncertainty: changing definitions of Aboriginality and the external, often discretionary, imposition of identity. Historical case studies illustrate that a certain slippage was always part and parcel of the quest to define who is, and who is not, considered as Aboriginal.

Read the entire article here.

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