'Essentially sea‑going people' : how Torres Strait Islanders shaped Australia's border

As an Opposition member of parliament in the 1950s and 1960s, Gough Whitlam took a keen interest in Australia’s responsibilities, under the United Nations’ mandate, to develop the Territory of Papua New Guinea until it became a self-determining nation. In a chapter titled ‘International Affairs’, Whitlam proudly recalled his government’s steps towards Papua New Guinea’s independence (declared and recognised on 16 September 1975). However, Australia’s relationship with Papua New Guinea in the 1970s could also have been discussed by Whitlam under the heading ‘Indigenous Affairs’ because from 1973 Torres Strait Islanders demanded (and were accorded) a voice in designing the border between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Whitlam’s framing of the border issue as ‘international’, to the neglect of its domestic Indigenous dimension, is an instance of history being written in what Tracey BanivanuaMar has called an ‘imperial’ mode. Historians, she argues, should ask to what extent decolonisation was merely an ‘imperial’ project: did ‘decolonisation’ not also enable the mobilisation of Indigenous ‘peoples’ to become self-determining in their relationships with other Indigenous peoples? This is what the Torres Strait Islanders did when they asserted their political interests during the negotiation of the Australia–Papua New Guinea border, though you will not learn this from Whitlam’s ‘imperial’ account

How shall we write the history of self‑determination in Australia?

The Uluru Statement from the Heart of May 2017 articulated an Indigenous vision for a better relationship between settler and Indigenous Australians: one ‘based on justice and self-determination’. The culmination of years of consultation with Indigenous people about constitutional recognition, the statement proposed a referendum in which the Australian people could approve (or not) the formation of an Indigenous deliberative and advisory body – a Voice to Parliament. The government-appointed Referendum Council endorsed this proposal, but the Australian Government quickly dismissed it in October 2017. One prominent advocate of the Uluru Statement and member of the Referendum Council, Megan Davis, seemed to anticipate that response when, back in January 2016, she stated that ‘Australia has rejected self-determination – freedom, agency, choice, autonomy, dignity – as being fundamental to Indigenous humanness and development’

'Taxpayers' money'? : ATSIC and the Indigenous sector

Funding organisations controlled by Indigenous Australians and dedicated to serving them, in the name of ‘self-determination’, has created risks both for governments (who must satisfy the public that ‘taxpayers’ money’ is being well spent) and Indigenous leaders (who must not only meet service expectations of Indigenous Australians but also acquit funding according to government criteria). This chapter compares two experiments in governance: the Indigenous sector (thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC)

Reconciliation as public culture : taking cultural studies beyond Ghassan Hage's 'white nationalist'

This year we celebrate not only the twentieth anniversary of the Culture and Communication Studies section but also the twentieth anniversary of Ghassan Hage’s White nation—his ethnographic account of what he calls the white national subject. My paper is an attempt to build on Ghassan’s work by considering research published since his book. I will argue that in the public culture of Australia, Indigenous people and Indigenous things are now prolifically affirmed. Before I explore this Indigenous-affirmative culture, let me explicitly exclude two topics: the extent and nature of racism against Indigenous Australians; and Indigenous Australians’ experiences of contemporary Australian society

Indigenous politics

As recently as the third edition of his introduction to Australian government and politics, ]. D. B. Miller remarked: 'The smallness of [Aborigines'] numbers means that these dark people are not a political force, and are never likely to be one'. The ANU's L. F. Crisp sustained this view the longest, getting to his textbook's fifth (and last) edition in 1983 without noticing that: a constitutional referendum in 1967 had attracted a uniquely high vote in favour of (what was promoted as) a new inclusiveness and racial equality; Neville Bonner had been in the Senate since 1971; the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (1974-6) had discussed the place of Aborigines in the Commonwealth Public Service; and that the Commonwealth's devolution of 'self-government' on the Northern Territory in 1978 had reserved to the Commonwealth legislature powers over Aborigines' statutory land tenure (Crisp 1955-1983, 5th edn). By then, however, the proliferation of Australian political science textbooks had begun to offer an alternative to this habitual uninterest in Indigenous matters

Australasia

‘Australasia’ refers to Australia and New Zealand, two liberal-democratic nation-states arising from British colonisation - beginning in 1788 - of peoples that we now call Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and Maori. With Britain's blessing, by the early twentieth century, the colonists of Australasia had replicated Westminster's democratic model. However, the two dominions approached differently the enfranchising of indigenous people. After the Second World War, the United Nations (UN) entrusted the Australasian democracies to establish democratic institutions in Pacific colonies. ‘Democracy’ was among their colonising projects

Indigenous affairs

John Howard took until his fourth term to actualise his preferred approach to Indigenous affairs. As he says in his autobiography Lazarus Rising: ‘our last year in government finally saw a paradigm change. It was as if the dam had finally burst and much of the approach which had held sway for a generation, or more was swept away. Howard is referring to taking over Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory – known as the Northern Territory Intervention. This package, announced on 21 June 2007 by Mal Brough, the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, included the following items: alcohol restrictions on Northern Territory Aboriginal land; controls on welfare recipients’ expenditure (Basics Card); linking welfare payments to parental performance in getting their children to school; compulsory health checks for Aboriginal children; acquiring certain townships on Aboriginal land through five-year leases; increasing police presence in certain communities; new rent and tenancy arrangements for households; additional funds for housing; banning X-rated pornography in prescribed communities; ending the permit system for defined areas within Aboriginal lands; phasing out the Community Employment Development Projects (CDEP) scheme, to encourage people into ‘mainstream’ employment; appointing managers of all government business in certain communities. I will not revisit the debate about the Intervention. I will instead locate it in its party-political context and point to five legacies of Howard’s approach to Indigenous policy

Coombs the Keynesian

It is a commonplace fact that H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs was among the first enthusiastic Australian Keynesians. Groenewegen and McFarlane, in their biographical sketch, call Coombs ‘a leading figure in the implementation of the “Keynesian Revolution” in economic policy’.2 I would not dispute this, but I do not find it very helpful either, partly because in none of the 13 references that Groenewegen and McFarlane make to the ‘Keynesian revolution’ do they tell you what that ‘revolution’ consisted of. To label Coombs a ‘Keynesian’ is only the beginning of an effort to understand him as an intellectual

Indigenous incorporation as a means to empowerment

Formal incorporation statutes are arguably the single most important way that public policy gtves shape to Aboriginal governance. In much of what it does, the state addresses Indigenous Australians as individuals: recognising their rights as individuals to vote to receive welfare benefits, to hold property, to receive award wages. The standardisation of such individual entitlements was the single most important achievement of the policy phase that we refer to as assimilation: Building on assimilation, but also to some extent countering its individuating logic, public policy since the 1970s has encouraged collective action. Advances in public policy - including land rights and native title statutes - have addressed Indigenous Australians as members or clients of Indigenous corporations. The study of Indigenous corporations is thus a major theme in our ongoing reflection on Indigenous affairs

“Rooted in demographic reality” : the contribution of new world censuses to Indigenous survival

One of the most powerful narratives deployed by colonists in the nineteenth century was that the colonized natives were inherently too weak to survive contact with those who were colonizing them-the Dying Native story. I argue that to understand the history of this story, we should differentiate between three senses in which it could be taken as true or false: physical destruction, genetic adulteration and loss of distinct culture. The physical destruction version of the "Dying Native" was contested by some settler-colonial governments as they developed the capacity to manage and measure the numbers of those whom they classified as "Indian" or "Māori" or "Aboriginal". However, the "Dying Native" story persisted as a narrative of these peoples' loss of genetic and/or cultural distinction. One strategy of Indigenous intellectuals has been to assert that they have survived as "populations" by adapting as "peoples". In this paper, I show how an authoritative demography of colonized Indigenous populations in North America and New Zealand afforded discursive opportunities to some Indigenous intellectuals