Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 36
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ABORIGINAL HISTORY Volume 36, 2012 ABORIGINAL HISTORY Volume 36, 2012 Published by ANU E Press and Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History 36 This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History is administered by an Editorial Board which is responsible for all unsigned material. Views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily shared by Board members. The Committee of Management and the Editorial Board Peter Read (Chair), Rani Kerin (Monographs Editor), Maria Nugent and Shino Konishi (Journal Editors), Robert Paton (Treasurer and Public Officer), Ann McGrath (Deputy Chair), Isabel McBryde, Niel Gunson, Luise Hercus, Harold Koch, Tikka Wilson, Geoff Gray, Dave Johnson, Ingereth Macfarlane, Brian Egloff, Lorena Kanellopoulos, Richard Baker, Peter Radoll. Copy Editor Geoff Hunt, Book Review Editor Luise Hercus. About Aboriginal History Aboriginal History is a refereed journal that presents articles and information in Australian ethnohistory and contact and post-contact history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Historical studies based on anthropological, archaeological, linguistic and sociological research, including comparative studies of other ethnic groups such as Pacific Islanders in Australia, are welcomed. Subjects include recorded oral traditions and biographies, narratives in local languages with translations, previously unpublished manuscript accounts, archival and bibliographic articles, and book reviews. WARNING: Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons. Contacting Aboriginal History All correspondence should be addressed to the Editors, Aboriginal History, ACIH, School of History, RSSS, Coombs Building (9), ANU, ACT, 0200, or [email protected] or [email protected] or shino.konishi@ anu.edu.au. Sales and orders for journals and monographs, and journal subscriptions: Thelma Sims, email: [email protected] or [email protected] Contacting ANU E Press All correspondence should be addressed to: ANU E Press, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Email: [email protected], Website: http://epress.anu.edu.au Aboriginal History Inc. is a part of the Australian Centre for Indigenous Studies, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University and gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of History RSSS and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, The Australian National University. Cover design: by ANU E Press Cover image: Dooley Binbin (facing camera) with other group members, 1961. Photo courtesy of John Wilson. Printed by Griffin Press. Aboriginal History Inc and ANU E Press, Canberra, Australia. Apart for any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. This edition © 2013 ANU E Press and Aboriginal History Inc ISSN 0314-8769 (print) ISSN 1837-9389 (electronic edition) Contents Preface . vii Dick Barwick: An appreciation from the Aboriginal History Board . ix Assimilation discourses and the production of Ella Simon’s Through My Eyes . 1 Jennifer Jones Food and governance on the frontiers of colonial Australia and Canada’s North West Territories . 21 Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster ‘Battlin’ for their rights’: Aboriginal activism and the Leper Line . 43 Anne Scrimgeour ‘What a howl there would be if some of our folk were so treated by an enemy’: The evacuation of Aboriginal people from Cape Bedford Mission, 1942 . 67 Jonathan Richards ‘We are Lutherans from Germany’: Music, language, social history and change in Hopevale . 99 Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg The founding of Aboriginal History and the forming of Aboriginal history . 119 Bain Attwood Book Reviews A Different Inequality: The Politics of Debates about Remote Aboriginal Australia by Diana Austin-Broos . 173 ‘Fire and Hearth’ Forty Years On: Essays in Honour of Sylvia J. Hallam edited by Caroline Bird and R Esmée Webb . 177 Blue Mountains Dreaming: The Aboriginal Heritage (Second Edition) edited by Eugene Stockton and John Merriman . 181 The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage . 185 Aboriginal Child Welfare, Self-government and the Rights of Indigenous Children: Protecting the Vulnerable Under International Law by Sonia Harris-Short . 189 The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo 1836-1909 by James Heartfield. 193 The People of the Paroo River: Frederick Bonney’s Photographs by Jeanette Hope and Robert Lindsay . 197 Irrititja – the Past: Antikirrinya History from Ingomar Station and Beyond by Ingkama Bobby Brown and Petter Attila Naessan . 199 v Doctor Do-Good: Charles Duguid and Aboriginal Advancement, 1930s-1970s by Rani Kerin . 201 The Tale of Frieda Keysser: Frieda Keysser and Carl Strehlow: An Historical Biography. Volume I: 1875-1910 by John Strehlow . 203 The Habitat of Australia’s Aboriginal Languages: Past, Present and Future edited by Gerhard Leitner and Ian G Malcolm . 207 A Wild History: Life and Death on the Victoria River Frontier by Darrell Lewis . 213 Outside Country: Histories of Inland Australia edited by Alan Mayne and Stephen Atkinson . 215 Pygmonia: In Search of the Secret Land of the Pygmies by Peter McAllister . 217 Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation by Russell McGregor . 219 Germans: Travellers, Settlers and their Descendants in South Australia edited by Peter Monteath . 221 Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the ‘History War’ by Robert Ørsted-Jensen . 225 Historical Dictionary of Australian Aborigines edited by Mitchell Rolls and Murray Johnson . 229 Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 by Lyndall Ryan . 233 That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott and Shaking Hands on the Fringe by Tiffany Shellam . 237 Belonging Together: Dealing with the Politics of Disenchantment in Australian Indigenous Policy by Patrick Sullivan . 241 Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition edited by Martin Thomas and Margo Neale . 243 Contributors . 249 Information for authors . 251 Aboriginal History Monograph Series . 253 vi Preface We are pleased to present Volume 36 of Aboriginal History. The volume is made up of a mix of papers, reflecting again the rich interdisciplinary project that is Aboriginal history. What that project is and has been, how it developed and was defined (or indeed not defined), and the role the journal played in shaping it, is the subject of the final article in this volume. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a long essay or a short history. In it, Bain Attwood details the personalities and the politics surrounding the foundation and early years of the journal and the intellectual stakes involved in the various disputes that emerged and at times erupted. The history of the journal is, then, also a history of the field. Attwood has drawn extensively on the journal’s archives, as well as interviewed many of the players involved, including some members of the Aboriginal History Board who were there from the outset, such as Niel Gunson, Isabel McBryde and Luise Hercus. For the important historical record it provides, the current Board, chaired by Peter Read, was keen for the piece to be published. As the journal editors, we were pleased to endorse this and to bring about its publication. We acknowledge and appreciate the two referees who willingly reviewed the article for us. The five articles that precede it cover a range of topics, disciplines and approaches. There is only one obvious commonality, which is that two of the five are about Cape Bedford Mission (or Hopevale) in Cape York. But that is where the similarity ends. Jonathan Richards’ article explores the evacuation of the Cape Bedford mission during the Second World War, providing an alternative account to the conventional interpretation. Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg is an ethnomusicologist. Her article examines the contemporary uses of church music and song to tell local histories and to express belonging to place at Hopevale. Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster provide a history of rationing on the nineteenth-century settler frontiers in Australia and North West Canada. Their article is a model of the value of a comparative approach. Jennifer Jones’ piece about the editing of Ella Simon’s autobiographical text, Through My Eyes, provides original insights into the complicated politics and meanings of assimilation. Anne Scrimgeour’s article on the Pindan mob’s challenge to the restrictive leper line in Western Australia illuminates an important event in the twentieth-century history of Aboriginal politics. As usual the volume includes an impressive number of reviews of books across many topics and the fields. We hope you enjoy them, and thank our review editor Luise Hercus for the work she does in commissioning them. For this volume we also acknowledge Professor Adam Graycar, Director of the Research School of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Social Science at ANU, for a small grant that allowed us to employ an editorial assistant. Laura vii ABORIGINAL HISTORY 2012 VOL 36 Rademaker, a doctoral student in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, where the journal is based, undertook this role with efficiency and aplomb. We are grateful to her. Finally, as we were preparing