Law, Justice, and Indigenous Intergenerational Trauma—A Genealogy

Aboriginal Australians experience trauma that is linked to continuing colonising practices in the present, and which are also reproduced throughout the more than 230 years of colonisation. Intergeneration trauma intersects with the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the welfare and justice systems. This paper examines evidence of the relations between trauma and colonialising practices imposed on Indigenous peoples, as past and present conditions leading to intergenerational trauma. Historical and present-day conditions affecting Aboriginal children and families are shown to set in place the conditions producing trauma over time.

Aboriginal Australian mental health during the first 100 years of colonization, 1788–1888: a historical review of nineteenth-century documents

Past histories charting interactions between British healthcare and Aboriginal Australians have tended to be dominated by broad histological themes such as invasion and colonization. While such descriptions have been vital to modernization and truth telling in Australian historical discourse, this paper investigates the nineteenth century through the modern cultural lens of mental health. We reviewed primary documents, including colonial diaries, church sermons, newspaper articles, medical and burial records, letters, government documents, conference speeches and anthropological journals. Findings revealed six overlapping fields which applied British ideas about mental health to Aboriginal Australians during the nineteenth century. They included military invasion, religion, law, psychological systems, lunatic asylums, and anthropology.

Interpopulational variation in human brain size: implications for hominin cognitive phylogeny

Throughout the hominin lineage brain size is believed to have increased threefold – increase which, it is argued by some researchers, results in the enhanced brain power that distinguishes humans from any other living being. However, as we demonstrate in this article this supposed increase is the result of comparing the species mean of contemporary humans with other great apes and fossil hominins. This method obscures both interpopulational variation among modern humans, and the fact that the putative increases in the mean are the result of an increase in the upper limit in some populations, which has the result of obscuring the relative stasis in the lower limit over the last 600k years. For example, populations such as Aboriginal Australians have a range that is more different from Danes than it is from that of Asian H. erectus over the last 600ka. Yet Aboriginal Australians, whose unique anatomy seems to be related to the climatic conditions of Australia, possess all of the socio-cognitive traits characteristic of all other modern-day populations – yet they seemed not to have undergone increase in brain size to the degree that many other populations have. In this instance brain size seems to be unrelated to cognition. In this article we present a statistical analysis of interpopulational variation in contemporary humans and why such an analysis is crucial for our understanding of hominin cognitive, social and technological evolution. We also suggest how such variation may add to our understanding of hominin ontogeny or life history. Additionally, we develop a model based on humanity’s unique form of embodied social cognition that results from our upright bipedal posture and hand morphology. This model is then used to explain the results of our statistical analysis and the possible factors underpinning the human emergence.

Enhanced Ecologies and Ecosystem Engineering

Anthropological and archaeological representations of Aboriginal Australians as hunter-gatherers adapting to the natural availability of food resources are simplistic and inconsistent with ethnographic records of active, strategic, and sociopolitically meaningful resource enhancement. Scholarship over the past four decades has documented plant and animal food resource enhancement by Aboriginal Australians that blur socioeconomic boundaries with agricultural societies of New Guinea. Enhancements were achieved by using intimate knowledge of local ecological processes to modify ecosystems through a range of strategies such as landscape burning, animal translocation, protected rearing, shelter creation, and restocking. These strategies were embedded within broader sociocultural and sociopolitical domains that were often accompanied by ritual. Such engineered food enhancement practices reveal that many documented and modelled associations between environment and behaviour are in fact correlations between behaviour and the products of behaviour. The uneven distribution of animal resource enhancement practices across Australia indicates considerable regional diversity and supports existing views that many enhancements are related to regionally specific and historically contingent developments in social complexity.

Digital Support for Indigenous Research Methodologies

Research undertaken by outsiders into issues of concern to Aboriginal communities frequently ignores community culture and the knowledge embedded within Aboriginal communities. Methodologies are adopted which perpetuate the colonialist mindset of non-indigenous Australians leading to failed solutions to Aboriginal problems. This paper describes an Aboriginal-led community-based research project, exploring the role of Aboriginal Australians in caring for, and transforming, their own communities. It focuses on the roles that Information Systems can play when providing an accessible platform for Aboriginal voices. The authors conducted an in-depth case study of one Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation (ACCO), the Illawarra Koori Men’s Support Group (IKMSG). The research consisted of a social network analysis (SNA) of the inter-organisational links of the IKMSG; interviews and focus groups with members of the IKMSG and the co-design of their first website. The prominence of the IKMSG in the SNA maps suggests that its work in the community is highly respected and that the model produced by this research can act as a guide for success in other ACCOs. The findings have been used to develop a theoretical model of Aboriginal community engagement and intervention. This model can enable authentic outcomes to projects which address Aboriginal concerns and support the conduct of community-led research in Aboriginal communities.