Jackie Wolfe on Aboriginal Town Camping

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Baehr, Elisabeth, and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, eds. 2017. "And there'll be NO dancing". Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australians since 2007. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing., 2017

Published as part of the collection: Baehr, Elisabeth, and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, eds. 2017. "And there'll be NO dancing". Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australians since 2007. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This chapter critically analyses the relationship of Aboriginal Australia to the Australian settler colonial state in the light of Georgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception.

Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office, Victoria, no.7, www.prov.vic.gov.au/provenance (September 2008)

Between 1913 and 1914 the residents of the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Station waged a campaign to allow Caroline Bulmer, the widow of their late missionary, to remain on the station with them. Preparing two separate petitions, the first to the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines, and the second to the Governor of Victoria, the residents sought to make themselves 'understood', as they put it, to the authorities at a time of great uncertainty about their future. This was a critical moment in the history of Aboriginal administration in Victoria, as the State garnered increasing and encompassing powers to control Aboriginal people and their land. Mrs Bulmer's continued residence was vehemently opposed by the Board's appointed manager of the reserve, and his hostility to the widow can tell us something about the lives of those who were forced to live under his administration. While the petitioners were unsuccessful, the story of their campaign, buried in the PROV archives, brings to light a forgotten, and perhaps unexpected, episode of cross-cultural collaboration on the issue of land and policy. Drawing on recent scholarship on the Indigenous use of writing as a tool of resistance, this article highlights the complexity of relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and reveals the persistence of Aboriginal efforts to determine their own future and to assert their right to do so.

In June 2007 the Australian federal government initiated a policy program that aimed to transform Aboriginal communities in Australia's Northern Territory (NT). In the months following the NT Intervention, several commentators and scholars remarked on the similarity of the policy to the coercive and assimilatory politics of Australia's colonial past. These authors argued that the Intervention represented a 'lack of capacity to abandon past thinking about colonialism'. This article contributes to a settler-colonial analysis of the Intervention by providing the first substantive comparison of the political discourses employed by the Liberal National (Coalition) government and the Labor government on the subject of the NT Intervention. By drawing on the emergent field of settler-colonial studies, I am able to identify the settler-colonial mentality that is shared by the Coalition and Labor governments.

Risk, Responsibility and the Welfare State. Eds. G. …, 2010

Aboriginal History Journal

Almost ten years ago, Denis Byrne noticed that Aboriginal heritage was gradually becoming foundational to our identity as a nation. Australia’s quest for a “longer past” necessitated acknowledgement of the continent’s Indigenous roots (Byrne 1996: 82). However, relatively little attention is being directed to analyzing the heritage of what Rapoport termed the more pragmatic manifestations of Aboriginal presence (Rapoport 1972) – for example, campsites. This paper proposes that considering increasing evidence for Aboriginal camping grounds not only surviving after settlement but became historic camps (‘fringe’ camps or town camps), these entities may have shaped the origin and character of our towns and suburbs to a far greater degree than is usually conceded. Examining the history of several camping grounds in and near Brisbane (Queensland), the author demonstrates their role in the founding of particular suburbs, and how the current location of many parks and reserves is a direct result of their endurance into the 1890s or even into modern times.

Aboriginal History Journal

One fine and warm winter morning in May 1942, the Poonbar, a medium-sized coastal vessel, steamed into the Endeavour River at Cooktown, North Queensland, and berthed at the town's wharf. After she tied up, over 200 Aboriginal people carrying a small amount of personal possessions emerged from a cargo shed on the wharf. The people were herded by about a dozen uniformed Queensland police as they boarded the boat. The loading, completed in just over an hour, was supervised by three military officers, two senior police and a civilian public servant. As the ship cast off, the public servant, who boarded the boat with the Aboriginal people, threw a coin to a constable on the wharf and shouted 'Wire Cairns for a meal!' Unfortunately, the wire did not arrive at Cairns in time, and as a result the party of Aboriginal people was given little food until they reached their destination, 1200 kilometres and two day's travel away. The war between Japan and the Allies was nearing Australia, and this forced evacuation of Aboriginal people was deemed necessary for 'national security' reasons. Although the evacuation has been written about by a number of scholars and Indigenous writers, the reasons for the order have not, I believe, been clearly established. Similarly, the identity of the forces -military or otherwise -that carried out the evacuation have never been conclusively determined. This article addresses these two issues alone. Japanese forces captured Singapore in February 1942, landing in New Guinea soon after. Darwin was bombed for the first time on 19 February, followed by more air raids in March and April. 2 In late March, the Deputy Director of the Queensland Department of Native Affairs, Cornelius O'Leary, wrote to the Home Secretary in Brisbane advising 'the evacuation of Cape Bedford aboriginals may be necessary': It is understood that the military authorities are considerably exercised by reason of the location and control of this Mission, and that representations

"Normalisation" was said to be a fundamental objective of Aboriginal land tenure reform in the Northern Territory between 2006 and 2010, including (most infamously) during the Federal Government's intervention into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities in 2007. In this article, I explore the key characteristics of "normalisation discourse" during this period and consider how these were reflected in the legal structure of the reforms. I find that normalisation discourse initially possessed 'colonial' attributes, including the consistent construction of Aboriginal communities as spatially-segregated, economically stagnant and socially dysfunctional. However, these characteristics became less prominent over time, later focusing on correcting the government's decades-old failure to secure tenure on Aboriginal land and standardising basic services and infrastructure in communities. This shift in rhetoric reflected the change in the legal structure of the reforms.