Ochre and Rust offers a fresh perspective on frontier relations between Australian Aboriginal people and European colonists. Nine museum artefacts take the reader into a fascinating zone of encounter and mutual curiosity between collectors and those indigenous people who piqued or responded to their interest. While colonialism is the broad frame, details gleaned from archives, images and the objects themselves reveal a new picture of interaction between individual Aboriginal people and European collectors. Philip Jones explores and makes sense of particular historical moments in colonial history, when Aboriginal people perceived and expected other, more elusive outcomes. Ochre and Rust, an elegantly written challenge to received wisdom about the colonial frontier, has won Australia's inaugural Prime Minister's Award for Literary Non-Fiction.

This book frames the Church of England's missionary outreach to Aboriginal people within the reality of frontier violence, government control, segregation, and neglect. As missionary control diminished, Aboriginal people responded more overtly and autonomously. Some regarded "white" Christianity as irrelevant while others adopted it in culturally satisfying ways. Through the Australian Board of Missions (ABM), the Church of England sought to convert Aboriginal people into a Europeanized compliant sub-caste. The separation of children from their families was the first step. The book also shows how the ABM found itself increasingly embroiled in emerging broader social issues and changing government policies, requiring it to rethink its own policies.

"The lives of Lucy and Percy Pepper, from Gippsland, Victoria, were affected by laws and government policies that defined who was 'Aboriginal' and who was not. This book reveals their struggle to keep their extended family together, fight for Australian in World War I, make good on a soldier settlement block, and survive ill health and poverty. Their story is told through correspondence between Percy and Lucy Pepper and government officials and Aboriginal administrators. The letters are now in the collections of the National Archives of Australia and the Public Record Office Victoria. 'Footprints' is a valuable resource for Aboriginal people who want to find archival records. In addition, anyone interested in Aboriginal policy in early twentieth-century Victoria can gain insights on the effects of past legislation and practices on individuals and families." -- BOOK COVER.

Martin Nakata's book, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines represents the most focussed and sustained Indigenous critique of anthropological knowledge yet published. It is impressive, rigorous, and sometimes poignant: a must-read for anyone concerned with the troubled interplay of Indigenous issues and academic institutions in Australia today. The book provides an alternative reading for those struggling at the contradictor and, ambiguous intersections of academia and Indigenous experience. In doing so it moves beyond the usual, criticisms of the disciplines which construct the way we have come to know and understand indigenous peoples. Nakata, a Torres Strait Islander academic, casts a critical gaze on the research conducted by the Cambridge Expedition in the late 1890s. Meticulously analysing the linguistic, physiological, psychological and anthropological testing conducted he offers an astute critique of the researchers' methodologies and interpretations.. He uses these insights to reveal the similar workings of recent knowledge production in Torres Strait education. In systematically deconstructing these knowledges, Nakata draws eloquently on both the Torres Strait Islander struggle and his own personal struggle to break free from imposed definitions, and reminds us that such intellectual journeys are highly personal and political. Nakata argues for the recognition of the complexity of the space Indigenous people now live in -- the cultural interface -- and proposes an alternative theoretical standpoint to account for Indigenous experience of this space.

'Incandescent, emotional, tragic and challenging' - Marcia Langton In this groundbreaking book, Peter Sutton asks why, after three decades of liberal thinking, has the suffering and grief in so many Aboriginal communities become worse? The picture Sutton presents is tragic. He marshals shocking evidence against the failures of the past, and argues provocatively that three decades of liberal consensus on Aboriginal issues has collapsed. Sutton is a leading Australian anthropologist who has lived and worked closely with Aboriginal communities. He combines clear-eyed, original observation with deep emotional engagement. The Politics of Suffering cuts through the cant and offers fresh insight and hope for a new era in Indigenous politics.

This book is an introduction to the archaeology of Australia from prehistoric times to the eighteenth century AD. It is the only up-to-date textbook on the subject and is designed for undergraduate courses, based on the author's considerable experience of teaching at the Australian National University. Lucidly written, it shows the diversity and colourfulness of the history of humanity in the southern continent. The Archaeology of Ancient Australia demonstrates with an array of illustrations and clear descriptions of key archaeological evidence from Australia a thorough evaluation of Australian prehistory. Readers are shown how this human past can be reconstructed from archaeological evidence, supplemented by information from genetics, environmental sciences, anthropology, and history. The result is a challenging view about how varied human life in the ancient past has been.

"The collection investigates the reciprocal significance of Oceania for the science of race, and of racial thinking for Oceania, during the two centuries after 1750, giving 'Oceania' a broad definition that encompasses the Pacific Islands, Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, and the Malay Archipelago. We aim to denaturalize the modernist scientific concept of race by means of a dual historical strategy: tracking the emergence of the concept in western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, its subsequent normalization, and its practical deployment in Oceanic contexts; and exposing the tensions, inconsistencies, and instability of rival discourses. Under the broad rubrics of dereifying race and decentring Europe, these essays make several distinctive and innovative contributions. First, they locate the formulation of particular racial theories and the science of race generally at the intersections of metropolitan biology or anthropology and encounters in the field a relatively recent strategy in the history of ideas. We neither dematerialize ideas as purely abstract and discursive nor reduce them to social relations and politics, but ground them personally and circumstantially in embodied human interactions."--Provided by publisher.

Glossary of 10 languages in English and Aboriginal from eastern Australia.