Notes
Stephen Muecke
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
Box 123 Broadway
NSW 2007
Australia
E‐mail: [email protected]
Quoted in Muecke and Shoemaker 5.
Ibid.
Ibid.
CitationChandarasekaran, “Australia's ‘Stolen Generation’ Seeks Payback: Aborigines Want Apology for Kidnappings” A01.
According to Citation ABC News, “PM Continues to Defend Ruddock”: “Mr Ruddock has told two foreign newspapers that one of the reasons Aborigines are disadvantaged is their relatively recent contact with developed civilisations.” See also Citation ABC News, “Ruddock in Hot Water over Wheel Comment.” Thanks to Naomi Wolfe for bring this information to my attention.
Reconciliation is a tenuous social movement, with some government endorsement, which aims to reconcile indigenous and non‐indigenous Australians over issues to do with social conditions for Aborigines, justice and an eventual treaty.
Sutton quotes statistics to show that the government's claims to have made progress for indigenous social conditions are unfounded.
Sandall, quoted in CitationArndt, “A Culture of Denial” 11.
It can be claimed that, independently of any assimilation policy, there is an “unforced”' assimilation process in which difference is incorporated without anyone thinking much about it. For this to be true, it depends on the validity of some general model of socialisation in which societies are becoming more and more homogenised towards a desirable norm. There is no sign that they are. Another problem with this position is that it unproblematically assumes the hegemonic power, or the attractiveness, of the “norm” to which one would assimilate.
Francesca Merlan has noted that commentaries on Aboriginal claims about Coronation Hill are usually framed within a binary of “tradition” and “modern‐ness,” a binary which tends to separate the two from each other as if each component is entirely distinct and autonomous. Aboriginal “modern‐ness” is thus understood here as involving either a loss of traditions or an “invention” of traditions, or both. For Merlan, however, traditional belief and modern contexts fold into each other in dynamic ways. See CitationGelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation 71.
Muecke, Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies 17: “‘Aboriginal bureaucrat’ becomes a monstrous term for both the Left radical consensus and the Right, for the former because of anti‐institutional libertarian tendencies, for the latter because they want their natives pure.”
Namatjira was given citizenship in 1957, which released him from being a ward of the State and allowed him to buy liquor, a house, etc., but limited his access to kin and country.
French, Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira Citation 1902 –1959 131.
Ibid. 133.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. 134.
Ibid.
Reproduced in ibid. 103.
Quoted in CitationGelder, “Aborigines and Cars” 449.
Ibid.
Ibid.; my emphasis.
Morphy, Ancestral Connections, Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge 304.
Ibid. 182.
Gordon Bennett, Home Décor [Preston+De Stijl=Citizen], 1996, various collections.
Ibid. 289.
Ibid. 291.
Ibid. 191.