“We are Human Beings,and have a Past”: The “Adjustment” of Migrants and the Australian Assimilation Policies of the 1950s

This article argues that the assimilation policy adopted by the Australian government during the 1950s was based on a denial of a migrant's past. The assumption that the migrant would readily merge into Australian cultural life ignored the ways in which past stories and memories shape the self. Through an analysis of the Good Neighbour Councils I explore the nature of assimilation that was based on a neglect of collective war memories of immigrant groups. This perspective is distinguished from that adopted by several theorists of the day such as W.D. Borrie and Jean Martin whose studies were less crude and one‐dimensional. The experiences of Greek migrants are examined to consider how Greek war stories could not often find expression or recognition in the assimilationist climate of the post‐war period.     

Indigenous Military Inclusion: A Settler Colonial Critique of the Regional Force Surveillance Units

In the context of this special issue's inquiry into whether it is possible to decolonise Australian international relations, this article investigates the service of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The military is a crucial site to investigate the colonial state of Australian international relations not only because it is an institution that performs key international relations practices such as war and diplomacy, but also because it defines and projects the identity of the state both domestically and internationally. In the past two decades, there has been a sustained effort to include Indigenous people in the ADF. An inclusive and multicultural defence purports to represent a post-colonial state where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people stand next to one another for the defence of their shared country. However, in Australia, Indigenous people do not enjoy the wealth of the nation equally and remain dispossessed from their land and economically disadvantaged. Using discourse analysis of publicly available materials praising Indigenous military inclusion, this article argues that the inclusion of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force risks further entrenching the settler colonial project.     

Rights,Duties and Aboriginal People

In this paper I reconsider debates in the Australian colonies in the 1830s and 1840s about Aboriginal people and rights in land. I contend that Aboriginal rights of property in land were seldom the matter at stake in these debates. Further, I argue that a notion of duties rather than rights was invoked by Christian humanitarians as they pleaded that Aboriginal people should be provided with protection as well as compensation for the loss of their lands. I suggest that the position that they adopted was determined not so much by the moral, political or legal principles they sought to uphold but by their acknowledgement of material forces at work in the colonies. I also point out that the debate that occurred about rights in land was an intra-British one that concerned the rights of settlers vis-à-vis the Crown. Finally, I suggest that the principal ways in which pastoral leaseholders tried to legitimise their claims to land were rather different to that suggested by historians in recent decades.     

Gabriel Barrios Cabrera: The anti-agrarian friend of the Campesino1

Abstract — This article considers the cacicazgo of Gabriel Barrios Cabrera in the Sierra de Puebla, Mexico during the 1920s. It analyses the ways in which he introduced social and economic development, and clarifies the apparent contradiction in his hostile response to agrarismo yet benevolence towards the region's campesinos. A picture emerges of a regional leader whose own philosophy and actions were fashioned by distinctly local views on land, autonomy and patronage. As such, his style of leadership defies neat categorisation and suggests that rural leaders could not help but reflect the characteristics and interests of the region in which they operated.     

Watching Bran Nue Dae in Japan

While recently teaching in Japan, I used the Australian film Bran Nue Dae (2009), directed by Rachel Perkins, in one of my courses. The mixed, but non-Australian students, were interested to discuss why a film that was partly about family and historical trauma was a comedy. Extending from the interest, this article considers whether there has been a similar response in Australia to Indigenous-themed films. Are Indigenous issues in Australia, today, also understood to be best represented as serious; that is, to be presented in terms of trauma and with a focus on the difficult moments? Why might many people—the Tokyo students, but also non-Indigenous people in Australia—find it hard to laugh with (or even at) Aboriginal peoples doing funny things? Using Bran Nue Dae, and my students' reactions, this article examines the usefulness and limits of the sometimes careful attendance to issues of race and pain, which are often the way non-Indigenous people engage with Indigenous peoples and issues. Drawing on the success of Perkins' film, the article also explores the usefulness of comedy.     

Anti‐Cartel or Anti‐Foreign? Australian Attitudes to Anti‐Competitive Behaviour before the First World War

More than a century elapsed between Australia's first legislative attempts to modify anticompetitive behaviour (the Australian Industries Preservation Act 1906) and its most recent efforts to criminalise price fixing (Trade Practices Amendment (Cartel Conduct and Other Measures) Act 2009). After a burst of activity in the first decade of Federation, the intervening years saw only sporadic interest by governments to promote competitive markets, with limited impact until the late 1960s. This paper assesses the first period of Australia's attempts to promote competition. It traces the political, economic and social environments of anticompetitive business behaviour in Australia from 1901 up to World War I. We suggest that Australia's initial forays into regulating cartels were motivated more by protectionist aims than by efforts to increase competition, which in part also explains the next half‐century of legislative apathy towards anti‐competitive legislation.     

“Sun Arise”: The Appropriation of Australia’s First Peoples’ Music, 1956–1974

While the music of Australia’s First Peoples contributes to a growing list of academic books and articles, the appropriation of that music by non-Indigenous pop musicians has received little academic attention. During the 1950s and 1960s, Australian audiences dismissed early attempts at fusing pop with Indigenous instrumentation as embarrassingly kitsch; at the same time, many Australian historians and archaeologists viewed Aboriginality as something primitive, a relic of the “stone-age”. Consequently, there was very little commentary on the cross-pollination between pop and Indigenous music. This article examines this phenomenon. Drawing on contemporary newspaper articles and vinyl record releases, this article argues that pop music appropriated Australia’s Indigenous music soon after art developing its fusions with Indigenous culture. Older popular musicians were more prepared to experiment than young pop performers. The reluctance of young pop musicians to experiment with Indigenous music was primarily an economic decision—American rock’n’rollers had captured the local teenage market. After more recordings of Aboriginal music became commercially available, interest in Indigenous music accelerated, and younger non-Indigenous musicians saw opportunities to incorporate Indigenous themes and instrumentation into their own material.     

Pearson and Responsibility: (Mis‐)Understanding the Capabilities Approach

Aboriginal Australian public intellectual Noel Pearson has gained prominence and influence for his brand of policy reform in Indigenous affairs by drawing upon the capabilities approach. This article challenges the coherence of Pearson's position, arguing that his unrelenting focus on personal responsibility leads him to conflate different elements within capabilities thinking. Pearson 1) mistakes social capabilities (to which people are entitled) for human potential to be unfolded, and 2) casts and prescribes personal responsibility as a type of latent capability. The latter a) inverts the capabilities approach wherein phenomena such as personal responsibility arise as an effect of the realization of latent capabilities rather than serving as latent capabilities themselves, and b) is at odds with the liberal basis of the capabilities approach that rejects imposing “good” ways of life on people. This is illustrated through reference to Pearson's advocacy of Direct Instruction teaching and engagement with the “real economy”. The paper recognizes Pearson's contribution to the policy debate and that the problems he highlights are real, but argues that the remedial approaches adopted are problematic, including in terms of Pearson's stated stance against assimilationist policy agendas.     

Family Historiography in The White Earth

In recent years, family history research has become a popular activity for many Australians. This imperative to connect with our ancestors extends into the field of literary production. In this essay, we examine one prominent novel that reflects this movement, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004). Looking through a lens of family history and historiography, the novel asks questions about postcolonial belonging, inheritance, and the violent foundations of the nation. McGahan’s young protagonist, William, stands to inherit a vast but crumbling property on the Darling Downs in Queensland. As William discovers more about the land, he comes into contact with both his own white pastoralist ancestors, and the powerful Indigenous spirits who inhabit secret and sacred spaces in the landscape. We argue that William’s encounter with secret family histories produces the hysteria at the climax of the novel, when the repressed violence of the past returns to haunt the present. Confronted with hidden knowledge, William—and, by proxy, the reader—is called to reconsider inherited histories in light of contemporary historiographies. The move towards knowledge of the family’s origins is a realisation of the complexity of the white Australian relationship to the land and its first inhabitants.     

Facing the Inevitable: Britain's Entry into the European Community and Australia's Policy, 1970‐72

While Australia's response to Britain's 1961‐63 bid to join the European Community has been examined in almost every possible detail, Australian policy towards Britain's 1970‐72 application has drawn very little scholarly attention. This article therefore aims to fill this gap by drawing on newly released archival material from the National Archives of Australia in Canberra and the National Archives in London. In doing so, the article examines the impact of Britain's 1971‐72 application to join the EC on Australian policy and the Anglo‐Australian relations. It argues that while far from provoking the same widespread uproar as the Macmillan government's original application in 1961, Britain's final bid had important political and economic implications for Australian foreign policy.     

Building Neo-liberal Markets and Other Agendas: The Politics of Risk Management at AusAID

Abstract

This article analyses emerging approaches by donors to risk management, focusing on the case of the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID). It suggests that AusAID's understanding and management of risk are expressions of particular political and social interests and, subsequently, that its approach to risk management is inherently political in nature. While AusAID's policies and guidelines on risk management identify a wide range of risks as being relevant to the agency's work – including risks to poverty reduction and sustainable development – in practice it has focused on managing risks to the building of neo-liberal markets, both within Australia and in developing countries, and the Australian government's foreign policy objectives. To illustrate these points, we present an analysis of AusAID's approach to risk management in a major economic governance project, the Philippines-Australia Partnership for Economic Governance Reforms. We conclude by indicating ways in which donor approaches to risk management can be revised to give greater attention to the needs of the poor and civil society, while acknowledging that such revisions may be contingent upon prior changes in the structure of power and interest and/or institutional characteristics of aid policy-making processes in donor countries.     

The Diaries of Daisy Smith: The Experience of Citizenship for an Exempted Family in Mid‐Twentieth Century Queensland

There has been limited sustained analysis of the lived reality of citizenship amongst Indigenous Australians exempted from protectionist legislation last century. Through examining the diaries of Daisy Smith, this paper explores how her household, exempted from such legislation in Queensland, experienced citizenship during the 1940s and early 1950s. The diaries show that Daisy Smith and her family exercised civil, political and social rights of citizenship, enjoyed meaningful lives and had a sense of belonging to the Australian nation. However, they also show that Daisy Smith constantly worked hard to uphold the conditions of exemption and protect her family's exempted Aboriginal status. These conditions required the Smith family to deny and relinquish all connection with their Indigenous heritage and embrace the dominant Anglo‐Celtic culture or risk losing exemption. In this way, their inclusion in the Australian nation and enjoyment of citizenship rights were conditional upon them being manifestly normative Anglo‐Celtic citizens. Their experience of citizenship was by its nature restrictive and coercive.     

The Missing Fifth Dimension: The Writing of Australian History in Germany*

German historical writing about Australia can be traced back to the early periods of European exploration of Terra incognita. A corpus of German‐Australian literature exists in the historical notes that were part of early travel books, geographic sketches and emigrant guides. Historical fiction provides another element. However an empirical historiography which elevated Australian history from footnotes and established it as the focus of a professional discipline did not develop until later. Australia was too often wrongly viewed as a space without history. This article examines the professional treatment of Australian history in Germany and the difficult path which faced those who sought to establish the history of Australia as an independent research field. It focuses upon three aspects: (a) the historical background of German Overseas Studies; (b) Australian history as topic in Germany's historiography; and (c) the post‐war situation of Australian historical studies in Germany.     

The Changing Terrain of Rural Contention in Brazil: Institutionalization and Identity Development in the Landless Movement's Educational Project

Studies of the Brazilian Landless Movement, particularly the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, Landless Rural Workers' Movement), note two periods of collective action: the time when tactics such as land occupations are deployed to acquire land (luta pela terra) and subsequent mobilizations to develop territory (luta na terra). The latter period, which includes fostering educational opportunities and coordinating economic production, features prolonged interaction with government authorities. Instead of demobilizing during institutionalization, this study argues, postoccupation practices are as contentious as seizing territory. This is apparent in the movement's efforts to influence public policies that lead to the creation of schools where a contentious, movement‐centered identity develops. Documenting the movement's efforts in education provides a way to understand how the current moment in rural contention in Brazil—called by some the time to acumular forças (accumulate forces)—remains collective and political instead of indicating movement decline.     

Exhibiting the Enlightenment: Joseph Banks’s Florilegium and Colonial Knowledge Production

ABSTRACT

The returned Australia-Japan Foundation Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo (2014–15), Anna Johnston, reflects on a 2014 exhibition held in Tokyo: The Bunkamura Museum of Art’s “Captain Cook’s Voyage and Banks’ Florilegium.” The Florilegium continues to have resonance as part of Australia’s complex colonial inheritance from the Enlightenment past. Its display and interpretation both overseas and within Australia provides an opportunity to better understand its origin in a pivotal historical period, globally, and its contribution to knowledge in arts and sciences. The Florilegium also reveals how Indigenous knowledge was central to European exploration and knowledge production. This article outlines contextual issues and seeks to provide a complex biography of this scientific and artistic artefact of Empire, in order to propose new ways of reading the Florilegium that pay attention to that enriched biography.     

Konfrontasi and Australia's Aid to Indonesia during the 1960s

This article examines Australia's aid program in Indonesia in the 1960s. With the transfer by the Dutch of West New Guinea to Indonesia in May 1963, the Australian government looked to expand aid to its northern neighbour beyond the Colombo Plan in an effort to cement friendly relations. The events associated with konfrontasi threatened this policy objective. Yet despite Indonesia's belligerent stance, Australia was able to continue its aid program (by supporting the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network) and to keep the lines of communication with Jakarta open. When konfrontasi ended in August 1966 after regime change in Indonesia, Australia was able to rapidly expand its aid program. This article argues that konfrontasi changed the ways in which Australia's aid program in Indonesia was construed, which in turn contributed to a re‐consideration of the role of aid in Australia's foreign policy more broadly.     

Decolonising Australia's International Relations? A Critical Introduction

Australia's international relations (IR) discipline has a deep colonial history, but has never been through a conscious process of decolonisation. Although discussions of decolonising IR have taken place elsewhere, the discussion in Australia is in its infancy. This collection examines the possibilities for decolonising Australia's IR in the present moment, looking at its teaching practice, its research, its styles of analysis, and its relationship with Australian foreign policy. We consider what is particular to Australia's settler colonial context, what is achievable, and what is not. The collection also seeks to develop a new style of anti-colonial foreign policy analysis in Australia, looking at the relationship between colonisation, settlement, and foreign policy. In this introduction, we first look over debates on decolonisation elsewhere in the field. We then examine the historical background of Australia's IR discipline, and look at Australian Indigenous diplomacy, to consider what is specific to Australia's context. We conclude by looking over the contributions of the papers in this collection, and consider what a decolonised Australian IR might look like. Ultimately, we argue that any process of decolonisation will be extremely difficult, and that decolonisation in Australian IR should be perceived as an ongoing struggle, rather than an endpoint in itself.     

Farewell My Country? Hermannsburg,Gus Williams,and the Indigenised Heimatlied

This microhistory focuses on a little-known aspect of Indigenous musical life in the 1960s in the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission (now Ntaria) in Central Australia. I contemplate the possible meanings arising when Gus and Rhonda Williams translated the secular German Heimat- cum-Wanderlied [song of home-cum-wandering], “Ade du mein Heimatland”, [Farewell to you my homeland], into Arrarnta as “Ade pmara nukai” [Farewell my country], and “presenced Indigeneity” for a predominantly non-Indigenous, southern audience. I explore how a German song became “travelling culture”; how it was received and modified to suit both missionary and Indigenous purposes, in the process both expressing a vernacularised Arrarnta Lutheranism, as well as maintaining music’s vital role in Indigenous culture, including as a signifier of love of country. I further examine how the song could have a political meaning in the nascent land rights context of the day, as an assertion of attachment to country or “Indigenous Heimat” that could resonate back, across a cultural divide, with a non-Indigenous Lutheran audience.     

Separatism or Status‐Quo?: Indigenous Affairs from the Birth of Land Rights to the Death of ATSIC*

Unlike other settler societies, Australia has yet to recognise Indigenous peoples as “peoples” or “nations”. Despite this, we see something of a consensus emerging which suggests Indigenous “separatism” has been tried and failed in Australia, and it is time to revisit an integrationist approach in order to improve Indigenous peoples' socio‐economic position. This paper challenges the assumption that, beginning in the 1970s, Indigenous‐state relations have been characterised by the realisation of a separatist agenda. On the contrary, assessing three decades of Indigenous‐state relations reveals a consistent logic from the state which ultimately seeks to integrate Indigenous Australians, rather than recognise them as having a distinct — and separate — political identity. This logic reached its “natural” conclusion with the abolition of elected Indigenous political representation in 2005.