Readings.com.au: Bain Attwood

The Struggle For Aboriginal Rights

The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights is the first book of its kind. Not only does it tell the history of the political struggle for Aboriginal rights in all parts of Australia; it does so almost entirely through a selection of historical documents created by the Aboriginal campaigners themselves, many of which have never been published. It presents Aboriginal perspectives of their dispossession and their long and continuing fight to overcome this.
In charting the story of Aboriginal political activity from its beginnings on Flinders Island in the 1830s to the fight over native title today, this book aims to help Australians better understand both the continuities and the changes in Aboriginal politics over the last 150 years: in the leadership of the Aboriginal political struggle, the objectives of these campaigners for rights for Aborigines, their aspirations, the sources of their programmes for change, their methods of protest, and the outcomes of their protest.
Through the words of Aboriginal activists, across 150 years, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights charts the relationship between political involvement and Aboriginal identity.

Telling The Truth About Aboriginal History

Once upon a time disagreement among historians was a matter for genteel debate in lecture theatres. Now claim and passionate counterclaim spill over into newspapers, radio talkback shows and pubs.

Bain Attwood takes us to the heart of the 'history war' in Australia, arguing that controversy over interpretations of our Aboriginal past has never been so intense, and never mattered more. He presents some of the most vexed issues in Aboriginal history, showing how they raise fundamental issues about the nature of historical knowledge, truth and authority:

How many Aboriginal people were killed in frontier conflict and was this genocide?

Was there ever a massacre at Risdon Cove in Tasmania?

* Does Aboriginal oral history count as real history?

Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History also tracks the development of Aboriginal history as a legitimate field of study over the past three decades, explaining the public impact of historians' work on frontier relations, the 'stolen generation' and 'terra nullius'. This work is now under attack from revisionists who are anxious to claim a benign colonial past. What is at stake is nothing less than Australia's identity as a nation.

the work of Windschuttle as a lynchpin in his discussion. Most other historians and critics have been reluctant to consider Windschuttle's work seriously, preferring to dismiss the man and his history. Attwood treats Windschuttle and his work respectfully but critically, arguing that it can provide a window onto the ways in which historical knowledge, truth and authority are established by history-tellers. Identifying a dozen keywords central to the controversy over Aboriginal history (from 'genocide' to 'myth' to 'objectivity'), Attwood analyses the way in which Aboriginal history has been researched and written, and uses it to shed light on wider matters, crucial to Australian history, and to the Australian present.

Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History will itself cause much debate and it will be seen locally and internationally as a major work in Australian history.

Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History

Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History tells the fascinating story of the only treaties ever made in Australia. It contemplates why these agreements were forged, how the Aboriginal people understood their terms, why government repudiated them, and how settlers claimed to be the rightful owners of the land.

Bain Attwood also reveals the ways in which the settler society has endeavoured to make good its act of possession—by repeatedly creating histories that have recalled or repressed the memory of Batman, the treaties, and the Aborigines’ destruction and dispossession—and charts how Aboriginal people have unsettled this matter of history through their remembering.

Bain Attwood is a leading scholar in the field of cross-cultural history. He is professor in the School of Historical Studies, Monash University, and adjunct professor in the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, The Australian National University. He is the author of The Making of the Aborigines, Rights for Aborigines and Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History.

Nineteen Sixty Seven Referendum

On 27 May 1967 a remarkable event occurred. An overwhelming majority of electors voted in a national referendum to amend clauses of the Australian Constitution concerning Aboriginal people. Today it is commonly regarded as a turning point in the history of relations between Indigenous and white Australians. This was the historic moment when citizenship rights were granted including the vote and the Commonwealth at long last assumed responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. But the referendum did none of these things.

The 1967 Referendum explores the legal and political significance of the referendum and the long struggle by black and white Australians for constitutional change. It traces the emergence of a series of powerful narratives about the Australian Constitution and the status of Aborigines, revealing how and why the referendum campaign acquired so much significance, and has since become the subject of highly charged myth in contemporary Australia.

Attwood and Markuss text is complemented by personal recollections of the campaign by a range of Indigenous people, historical documents and photographs.

Bain Attwood is an Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University and Adjunct Professor at the Australian National Universitys Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. Andrew Markus is Professor of Jewish Civilisation and the Academic Director of the Australian Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilisation. Both have written extensively on Aboriginal history and Australian race relations

Rights For Aborigines

We cannot help but wonder why it has taken the white Australians just on 200 years to recognise us as a race of people Bill Onus, 1967
Aboriginal people were the original landowners in Australia, yet this was easily forgotten by Europeans settling this old continent. Labelled as a primitive and dying race, by the end of the nineteenth century most Aborigines were denied the right to vote, to determine where their families would live and to maintain their cultural traditions.
In this groundbreaking work, Bain Attwood charts a century-long struggle for rights for Aborigines in Australia. He tracks the ever-shifting perceptions of race and history and how these impacted on the ideals and goals of campaigners for rights for indigenous people. He looks at prominent Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners and what motivated their involvement in key incidents and movements. Drawing on oral and documentary sources, he investigates how they found enough common ground to fight together for justice and equality for Aboriginal people.
Rights for Aborigines illuminates questions of race, history, political and social rights that are central to our understanding of relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.