Abstract: Archives come in many forms. The past is inscribed in landscapes and seascapes, ochre and ink, percussion marks and plant residue, lore and local knowledge. Every place is an archive; every landscape can be read and reread for insights into its natural and cultural history. Indigenous novelist Alexis Wright describes "the land, seas, skies and atmosphere" of Australia as "the world's oldest library." It is where First Nations peoples "safeguard" their histories; it is home to "our ancestral stories."1 As Jill Milroy, a Noongar Elder and academic from southwest Australia, reflected in 2013:My mother and grandmother always taught me… that it is not people who are the best storytellers: the birds, the animals, the ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Front page of petition, courtesy of State Records Office of Western Australia.In November 1886, just two months after the Aborigines Protection Bill was passed in the Western Australian Legislative Council—an Act which established a Protection Board and enabled the appointment of Protectors of Aboriginal people—a petition was scripted on behalf of two Nyungar men, Tommy Dower and Johnny Carroll. The petition requested a piece of land at Wanneroo, swamp country to the north of the Perth township, for the families of Dower and Carroll to live and farm on. The petition itself is just half a page long, but as it was supported by forty-seven settlers of the Colony, the signatories drew the length of the document to two ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Across Australia, audio recordings of endangered song may prove especially important to cultural sustainability in Aboriginal communities because of the inherent connections between performance, various aspects of cultural life and the maintenance of Aboriginal identities and wellbeing.1 In Australia, an estimated 98 percent of Aboriginal performance traditions have been lost since colonisation.2 The increasing endangerment of Aboriginal languages directly impacts upon the vitality of Aboriginal song and just thirteen of more than two hundred Aboriginal languages are considered to be strongly spoken today.3 Audio recordings of old songs stored in archives such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This special issue presents a critical approach to working with Indigenous Australian communities and the archive. Since 1788, the archive created in and about the place now known as Australia has been shaped by the process of settler colonialism and its "logic of elimination," in which Indigenous people have been removed from their territories through violence, segregation and/or assimilation.1 The creation, preservation and interpretation of public historical records has been almost entirely in the hands of settlers and their descendants, making institutional archives a highly fraught space for many Indigenous people, as well as a significant space for creative resistance.2 Part of this resistance has included ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: For at least a generation, the question of the archive has moved to the centre of scholarly writing on colonialism. As scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds—anthropology, gender studies, history, literary studies and various national iterations of Indigenous studies—have understood empire-building and colonialism as forms of cultural domination, the question of knowledge has become a central analytical problematic. In this context, the archive is triply significant. First, it has often stood as a symbol of domination, of colonial hegemony and the tight connections between power and knowledge in colonial settings. Second, archives have often been understood as cultural sites produced by the routine ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Most missionaries were mendicants and Jesuits in the early modern Spanish world.1 These men played key roles in the establishment of both the Catholic Church and Spanish rule, whether at home in the Iberian Peninsula or abroad in overseas contexts. As preservers of historical memory, they also wrote important histories, relations and letters about their evangelizing duties, Spanish and Creole activities, and Indigenous and African customs. But even though missionaries were leading authors and agents of religious and cultural change throughout the Spanish world, there are many aspects about their early life experiences, theological training and proselytizing strategies that have yet to be properly explored. Not only ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Archives have been "instruments of human rights abuse and oppressive regimes" in the past, yet they can support self-determination and cultural self-expression.1 Native Title claims within Australia generate archives that are rich in detail about communities, both historical and contemporary, and as historian and anthropologist Pamela McGrath noted, "the onerous evidentiary requirements of the Native Title Act have resulted in, albeit unintentionally, one of the most substantial government-sponsored research efforts ever undertaken with Indigenous Australians."2 Legally, at the completion of a claim process, these archives are required to be returned to the Traditional Owner communities, in line with the Native ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Studies of decolonization used to be limited to constitutional histories, ending when colonies became independent; more recently, the scope and chronology of such studies has become wider. Sarah Stockwell's The British End of the British Empire makes a significant contribution to this trend through her consideration of four British institutions in the decades around the end of empire: the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Bank of England, Royal Mint, and Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. How each of these institutions adapted to changing circumstances is meticulously detailed and situated in extensive historiography. Stockwell's research in the archives of each institution, often using material that other ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Brooke N. Newman begins her insightful study about race in colonial Jamaica with a memorial written by three mixed-race men in 1825. The memorial lays out a complex, constitutional argument for extending English common law rights to people of mixed English and African parentage. The petitioners insist that all children born to an English parent should be regarded as "free born subjects of England," and they highlight their own English fathers as evidence for their common law birthright. The memorial is one of many documents preserved in the British National archives that has been "long overlooked" (3). These archives, explains Newman, capture rare and important colonial voices that have been "excluded from the ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Malaria was one of the major disease-generating conditions of the nineteenth century. It was a global disease and one that was believed to underpin a cluster of conditions which varied over time, including fever, impotence and paroxysms. Rohan Deb Roy's book is a study of the ways in which medico-scientific knowledge of malaria was assembled in the period between the "discovery" of quinine in the 1820s and the first Imperial Malaria Conference in Simla in 1909. But the book is also intended to be much more than this. It is simultaneously a contribution to the study of imperial governance of nineteenth-century India and an intervention in postcolonial historiography from the perspective of actor network theory and ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This book adds to the growing literature questioning binary models that have for centuries underpinned scientific enterprise, including human/non-human, objective/subjective, self/other, and also body/mind as in theories of embodied cognition, extended mind and cognitive ecology. And, as this study reflects, one of the most promising vehicles for this reaction is auditory as opposed to visual modalities. New attentiveness to the acoustic universe has encouraged a reconceptualization of the forms and levels of intelligence that animate all sounding creatures, questioning hierarchies which have centralised "man" (that gendering is intended) as the imperial centre of a creation identified as a vast resource to be ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter make clear the aim of this enjoyable volume of essays from the outset: they believe that historians need to take Lin-Manuel Miranda's multiple award–winning musical Hamilton seriously because its huge popularity amongst audiences—from politicians and high-school students to teachers and historians themselves—has already demonstrated its enormous potential to shape what people know and understand about one of America's founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, and the era of the American Revolution.Comprising fifteen critical essays, the volume is divided into three "Acts," focusing on script, stage and audience. Act I, "The Script," features work on adaptation, contemporary ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Siobhan M. Hart's newest book analyzing four heritage-scapes in New England balances praise for recent efforts to decolonize the sites of Aquinnah, Pocumtuck/Deerfield, Mashantucket and Patuxet/Plymouth through Native and non-Native collaboration while refusing to shy away from critical analysis that exposes the limited effectiveness of these sites. Each case study explores the complicated history of the site with Hart's observations from personal visits, archaeological fieldwork, and field trips involving students. These chapters are bookended by an introductory chapter establishing Hart's theoretical framework regarding heritage sites and colonialism, while the final chapter provides broader conclusions regarding ... Read More Keywords: Rocky Cape National Park (Tas.); Excavations (Archaeology); Nyunga (Australian people); Petitions; Folk songs, Aboriginal Australian; Archives; Noongar (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; Archivists; Kāi Tahu (New Zealand people); Beatt PubDate: 2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00