scholarly journals Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Indigenous-Australian Swansong or Songline?

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Cornelis M. B. Renes
Keyword(s):  
Northern Territory ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Transgenerational Trauma ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Aboriginal Communities ◽  
Indigenous Australia ◽  
Australian Continent ◽  
Marginal Status ◽  
Environmental Balance ◽  
Australian Flora

The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.

scholarly journals “And There'll Be NO Dancing”. Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia Since 2007

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Oliver Haag
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Informal Conversation ◽  
Indigenous Australia

“Sexual abuse of children is inexcusable. So why is there such a fuss about a state intervention? Should we shut up and do nothing just because there is racism? No child or woman must be molested, irrespective of who the perpetrator is!” Thus my recollection of what one of my Scottish colleagues said in an informal conversation about the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention, a set of legal and political measures intended to curtail domestic violence in Indigenous Australian communities. “Yes”, I replied, “race should not be an issue when talking about crime”. Not least because domestic violence happens everywhere, including Scotland. I would not have heard anyone talking about a specifically Scottish, White or European propensity for domestic violence. Yet there is abundant talk about Black violence. Generalisation is the hallmark of racialisation. Blackness is scripted as inherently violent—a tenacious trope deriving from colonial concepts of ferocious animalism (e.g. Eze 2000; Nederveen-Pieterse 1990).

scholarly journals REVIEW: Intervention in Aboriginal communities examined

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 238-241
Author(s):  
Bonita Mason
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Response ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Australian Government ◽  
Aboriginal Communities ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indigenous Australia ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

‘And there’ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on policies impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007, edited by Elisabeth Baehr and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 354 pp.  ISBN 9781443898638 ‘THE PAST is now with us; it never went away.’ The 2007 Intervention into the lives of Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory was a low point in the relationship between the Australian government and Indigenous people. As one of the Aboriginal authors in No Dancing, Warraimay historian Victoria Grieves puts it, the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), as the Intervention was officially known, ‘leaves no doubt about the relationship of Aboriginal people to the settler colonial state’ (p.  89).

Narratives and processes – Developing a responsive parent–child program to empower local facilitators in a remote Aboriginal community

2021 ◽  
pp. 147332502199241
Author(s):  
Carolin Stock ◽  
Maggie Kerinaiua Punguatji ◽  
Carmen Cubillo ◽  
Gary Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Play Therapy ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Parenting Program ◽  
Research Translation ◽  
Aboriginal Communities ◽  
Aboriginal Community ◽  
Parenting Support ◽  
Pilot Implementation ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Parent Child

This article presents the results of a retrospective study that critically examines the development of a responsive parent–child program from conceptualisation to pilot implementation. The development of the Play to Connect program was a continuation of research translation work of the Let’s Start parenting program which was delivered in remote Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory, Australia from 2005–2016. The impetus for the Play to Connect program came from the community need for parenting support that could be delivered by local Aboriginal workers living in the community. The aim was to bring research and community together through the co-creation of contextually relevant knowledge directly useful for local Aboriginal facilitators. Embedded in a dynamic cycle of planning, delivery, observation and reflection, the team of local Aboriginal staff and visiting practitioners designed and piloted an innovative, user-friendly and adaptable parent–child program which was underpinned by the evaluation findings of an existing program, drawing on the framework of play therapy. The 2.5 year long process of development brought about action and change for the local Aboriginal staff. They valued the co-creation of the program and resources and reported increased knowledge of child development and confidence to deliver family support in their community. This study shows that the development of Play to Connect was more than “tailoring” a parenting program – it was a way of creating sustainable support around a program to increase the chances of continuity of implementation and successful community engagement and development.

Re-imaging Aboriginal leadership in higher education – A new Indigenous research paradigm

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Payi Ford ◽  
Kathy Gotha Guthadjaka ◽  
James Walung Daymangu ◽  
Bettina Danganbar ◽  
Colin Baker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Women's Leadership ◽  
Indigenous Research ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Aboriginal Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aboriginal Women ◽  
Leadership In Higher Education

This article focuses on leadership by women in Indigenous research in the higher education sector of Australia. The research that provided the context for this exploration of Indigenous women’s leadership involved archiving ceremonial cultural knowledge from the Daly and Wagait regions of the Northern Territory. The article introduces the concept of Aboriginal corporeality and the struggle within colonial Australia and through to the present to prevent its erasure from Australia’s history. This struggle is referenced in the paradigm shifts underway in Indigenist research. The article acknowledges the past commitments of powerful Aboriginal women to the advancement of their clans’ people under the new circumstances that they had to confront from the 1880s. It is argued that the cultural agenda of these women prepared the ground for the advances in Indigenist research reported in this article. The article concludes with an example of the close, culturally significant partnership that was forged by the research project across two Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory.

Indigenous Studies: Australia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Minter
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Indigenous Australians ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Indigenous Australia ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Cultural Suppression ◽  
Australian Literature

Contemporary Indigenous Australian literature draws on tens of thousands of years of sustained cultural continuity and diversity, while bearing witness to the destructive impacts of colonization and assimilation, and imagining new horizons of restoration, healing, and sovereign expression. The late 18th-century arrival of the English language amid complex Indigenous societies presented Indigenous peoples with a set of unfamiliar literary, linguistic, and rhetorical conditions and forms, the sudden appearance of Western literary modernity forever changing Indigenous modes of expression. This “intercultural entanglement” of Indigenous Australian literature is central to an appreciation of its achievements, from its earliest appearances in letters, petitions, and chronicles aimed at negotiating with or at times subversively mimicking modes of colonial authority, to its growing confidence and autonomy in the 20th century as Indigenous Australians fought back again colonization, asserted civil and land rights, and began the long process of cultural restoration and healing, through to the sovereign expressions of Aboriginal consciousness today. Across various modern literary genres, from mythological narratives to political manifestos, in poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, Indigenous Australian authors have borne witness to tragic and humiliating histories of violence, incarceration, and cultural suppression and fragmentation, but have also assertively developed new and at times revolutionary reimaginings of Western literary modes and styles. Realist testimonial narratives and lyrics in prose and poetry are today complemented by assured works of the imagination in which genre and mode are transformed in the recovery of blood memory, country, and language. The literature of Indigenous Australia continues to make a profound contribution to the literature of the world.

Outstation School.S - A Case History

1992 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-26
Author(s):  
Derek Pugh
Keyword(s):  
Case History ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Aboriginal Communities ◽  
Small Communities

Maningrida is one of the largest of the Aboriginal communities in the ‘Top End’ of the Northern Territory. It is located on the eastern bank of the Liverpool River and is home for some 1000 residents. Maningrida is identified on most maps but what is not so readily identified is the large number of smaller communities, located within a 100 kilometre radius of Maningrida and provided with services from there (see Map 1). These small communities (outstations or homeland centres) are found on the homelands of the families who live within them and the groups are usually quite small.

Benefits of Community Involvement at the School Level

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
Western Australia ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
National Average ◽  
School Level ◽  
Student Enrollment ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Indigenous Students ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
Indigenous Student

I would like to begin by providing a context that can be used to place my discussion about experiences at a remote school in the Northern Territory (NT) into perspective.In the NT 53% of schools are located in remote areas and these cater for up to 23% of NT students (Combe, 2000). The NT has the highest proportion of Indigenous students enrolled in schools with 35.2% of the overall student population identifying as Indigenous Australian (Collins, 1999). The next closest state is Western Australia with an Indigenous student enrollment average of 5.1 %, this is compared with a national average of 3.2%.

scholarly journals Traditional food availability and consumption in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, Australia

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Ferguson ◽  
Clare Brown ◽  
Claire Georga ◽  
Edward Miles ◽  
Alyce Wilson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Food Availability ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Traditional Food ◽  
Aboriginal Communities
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