Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types, and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates, and locations erased so that individual women came to be anonymized as 'gins' and 'lubras.' The book identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued in the book. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Skin Deep shows how the industrialization of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep. *** "Impressively researched, written, organized and presented...highly recommended for community and academic library Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, and Colonial History reference collections." --Midwest Book Review, MBR Bookwatch: October 2016, Helen's Bookshelf [Subject: Cultural History, Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, Colonial Studies]

A twentieth-anniversary edition of this tour de force in feminism and Indigenous studies, now with a new preface The twentieth anniversary of the original publication of this influential and prescient work is commemorated with a new edition of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. In this bold book, of its time and ahead of its time, whiteness is made visible in power relations, presenting a dialogic of how white feminists represent Indigenous women in discourse and how Indigenous women self-present. Moreton-Robinson argues that white feminists benefit from colonization: they are overwhelmingly represented and disproportionately predominant, play the key roles, and constitute the norm, the ordinary, and the standard of womanhood. They do not self-present as white but rather represent themselves as variously classed, sexualized, aged, and abled. The disjuncture between representation and self-presentation of Indigenous women and white feminists illuminates different epistemologies and an incommensurability in the social construction of gender. Not so much a study of white womanhood, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman instead reveals an invisible racialized subject position represented and deployed in power relations with Indigenous women. The subject position occupied by middle-class white women is embedded in material and discursive conditions that shape the nature of power relations between white feminists and Indigenous women—and the unjust structural relationship between white society and Indigenous society.

This book explores storytelling as an innovative means of improving understanding of Indigenous people and their histories and struggles including with the law. It uses the Critical Race Theory (‘CRT’) tool of ‘outsider’ or ‘counter’ storytelling to illuminate the practices that have been used by generations of Aboriginal women to create an outlaw culture and to resist their invisibility to law. Legal scholars are yet to use storytelling to bring the experiential knowledge of Aboriginal women to the centre of legal scholarship and yet this book demonstrates how this can be done by way of a new methodology that combines elements of CRT with speculative biography. In one chapter, the author tells the imagined story of Eliza Woree who featured prominently in the backdrop to the decision of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Dempsey v Rigg (1914) but whose voice was erased from the judgements. This accessible book adds a new and innovative dimension to the use of CRT to examine the nexus between race and settler colonialism. It speaks to those interested in Indigenous peoples and the law, Indigenous studies, Indigenous policy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, feminist studies, race and the law, and cultural studies.

The literature on Australian Aborigines is vast, but much of it is strangely silent about the experiences and activities of women. This collection of stories of the eventful lives and strong characters of a number of Aboriginal women offers a more intimate and personal view. Their lives span a century of history in fifteen communities scattered from Cape York Peninsula, Arnhem Land and East Kimberley to the Western Desert, the Centre, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. One of these stories is an autobiography and each of the others contains transcriptions or translations of a woman's own reminiscences, with additional details given by the author. Some women recall the first time they saw a European in their land, others tell how Europeans had influenced their communities generations before they were born. While the authors lived in Aboriginal communities in order to study some particular aspect of the society, the women they describe here became their close friends, companions and helpers, and this book is a record of friendships formed against differences of background, experiences and age. Allegiance to family and familiar territory shapes the personal histories of Aborigines in ways scarcely appreciated by people reared in nuclear family households in cities. The strength of family and community ties can be better understood through reading about the women who contribute so much to the maintenance of these communities.

First published in 1939 by Routledge, this classic ethnography portrays the aboriginal woman as she really is - a complex social personality with her own prerogatives, duties, problems, beliefs, rituals and point of view. This groundbreaking and enduring study was researched in North-West Australia between 1935 and 1936 and was written by a woman who truly pioneered the study of gender in anthropology

A collection of writings on women and Aboriginal identity from 15 senior Indigenous academics and community leaders. The collection engages with questions such as: What makes Aboriginal women strong? Why are grandmothers so important (even ones never met)? How is the connection to country different for Aboriginal people compared to non-Aboriginal people’s love of nature or sense of belonging to an area? What is Aboriginal spirituality?

Childhood stories of family, country and belonging What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart – sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect. This groundbreaking collection will enlighten, inspire and educate about the lives of Aboriginal people in Australia today. Contributors include: Tony Birch, Deborah Cheetham, Adam Goodes, Terri Janke, Patrick Johnson, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jack Latimore, Celeste Liddle, Amy McQuire, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Miranda Tapsell, Jared Thomas, Aileen Walsh, Alexis West, Tara June Winch, and many, many more. Winner, Small Publisher Adult Book of the Year at the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards ‘Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is a mosaic, its more than 50 tiles – short personal essays with unique patterns, shapes, colours and textures – coming together to form a powerful portrait of resilience.’ —The Saturday Paper ‘... provides a diverse snapshot of Indigenous Australia from a much needed Aboriginal perspective.’ —The Saturday Age

Due to widespread geographical and cultural displacement, Australian Aboriginal people have experienced the destruction of their identity. This identity is traditionally closely linked to the land and the people, so that Aborigines feel an intense longing to rediscover their roots and reclaim their identity. In order to do this, they need to individually reconstruct their past, for instance by writing down their life stories. Thus Aboriginal women like Ruby Langford Ginibi have embarked on a process of reconnecting with their roots through the medium of autobiography. In discussing three of these autobiographies, this book examines the role of autobiographical narrative in the process of Australian Aboriginal women reclaiming their identity.

A searing new novel from leading Indigenous storyteller Tony Birch that explores the lengths we will go to in order to save the people we love.Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families. When a new policeman arrives in town, determined to enforce the law, Odette must risk everything to save Sissy and protect everything she loves. In The White Girl, Miles-Franklin-shortlisted author Tony Birch shines a spotlight on the 1960s and the devastating government policy of taking Indigenous children from their families.

"From 1950, increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Māori women became nationally or internationally renowned. Few reached the heights of international fame accorded Evonne Goolagong or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and few remained household names for any length of time. But their growing numbers and visibility reflected the dramatic social, cultural and political changes taking place in Australia and New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century. This book is the first in-depth study of media portrayals of well-known Indigenous women in Australia and New Zealand, including Goolagong, Te Kanawa, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Dame Whina Cooper. The power of the media in shaping the lives of individuals and communities, for good or ill, is widely acknowledged. In these pages, Karen Fox examines an especially fascinating and revealing aspect of the media and its history -- how prominent Māori and Aboriginal women were depicted for the readers of popular media in the past."--Publisher's description.