Colonists, Settlers and Aboriginal Australian War Cries: Cultural performance and economic exchange

Abstract

This paper examines a traditional Aboriginal Australian genre of performance for fun, known as ‘war corroborees’. These performances along with many other genres were an important part of commercial cross-cultural entertainment in Australia in the long nineteenth century. The performance practices have received little academic attention. When they have it has been within the frame of cultural tourism. This point of reference hides the Aboriginal practices that are drawn on for these performances as well as Aboriginal agency within the practices of commercial entertainment. My aim is to examine the extant documentation from non-Aboriginal observers in the archive related to Aboriginal initiated commercial performance practices in the context of Aboriginal cultures and practices to reveal a different account of these performances.

Notes

¹ ‘Country’ is the term used for the specific homelands of an Aboriginal grouping. To travel ‘in country’ means to travel within your own custodial lands.

² The doomed race theory was prevalent across most of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Basically it was a popular theory that so called primitive races must become extinct when they co-exist with ‘advanced’ races. The theory was reinforced and strengthened by Social Darwinism; see McGregor (1997).3 ‘Salvage ethnography’, as coined by James Clifford, refers to ethnographers who saw their task as recording cultures before they died out (Clifford 1986: 112).