Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Aboriginal Australians – New South Wales – History'

Thesis (MA)--Macquarie University (Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy. Warawara - Dept. of Indigenous Studies), 2005.
Bibliography: p. 327-333.
Introduction -- Sources and literature -- The notebooks -- Manuscripts and databases -- Neighbouring languages -- Phonology -- Pronouns -- Verbs -- Nouns -- Other word classes -- Retrospect and prospect.
'Wara wara!" - 'go away' - the first indigenous words heard by Europeans at the time of the social upheaval that began in 1788, were part of the language spoken by the inhabitants around the shores of Port Jackson from time immemorial. Traces of this language, funtionally lost in two generations, remain in words such as 'dingo' and 'woomera' that entered the English language, and in placenames such as 'Cammeray' and 'Parramatta'. Various First Fleeters, and others, compiled limited wordlists in the vicinity of the harbour and further afield, and in the early 1900s the surveyor R.H. Mathews documented the remnants of the Dharug language. Only as recently as 1972 were the language notebooks of William Dawes, who was noted by Watkin Tench as having advanced his studies 'beyond the reach of competition', uncovered in a London university library. The jottings made by Dawes, who was learning as he went along, are incomplete and parts defy analysis. Nevertheless much of his work has been confirmed, clarified and corrected by reference to records of the surrounding languages, which have similar grammatical forms and substantial cognate vocabulary, and his verbatim sentences and model verbs have permitted a limited attempt at reconstructing the grammar.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
xxi, 333 p. ill. (some col.), maps (some col.), ports

Examination of the hypervariable mitochondrial D-loop segment 1 (mt DLSl) reveals informative sequence types from aboriginal Australian people in the Darling River region of NSW (Riverine) and from Yuendumu in central Australia (Desert). Pairwise analysis reveals statistically significant structure in the populations although some identical DLSl types are seen in the two contrasting regions. Mt DLSl types may reflect more ancient distributions than linguistic diversity and other culturally distinguishing attributes. Median network sequence trees suggest that the northern Darling Riverine (including Ngiyambaa people) and south Darling Riverine (Paakintji) populations are distinguishable from each other implying a different evolutionary history, though the distinctions do not conform strictly to known language groups. Comparison with five published global studies reveals that these Australians demonstrate greatest divergence from some Africans, least from Papua New Guinea (PNG) highlanders and only slightly more divergence from some Pacific groups (Indonesian, Asian, Samoan and coastal PNG) although the DLSl types described appear different when listed. Sequence trees examined by the median network method demonstrate that several hypervariable nucleotide sites within the DLSl are likely to have undergone mutation independently making phylogenetic comparison with other global samples difficult. However, several nucleotide sites which vary in high frequency in some Australian DLSl types, also determine main separations in the median networks. The distribution of the frequencies with which these vary in an extended global data set from published studies, suggests that some may be useful markers to postulate prehistoric migration patterns. The frequency distribution for one of these, nucleotide 16223, suggests that a thymine at this site may be ancestral to the cytosine form seen in commonly in European and Pacific populations. The distribution of 16223T in Australian mtDLSl types compared to global studies is consistent with two main waves of immigrants entering Australia in prehistoric times and spreading at least as far as the Murray-Darling junction. Estimates of time for these colonising events remains elusive, because evolutionary rate at some nucleotide sites within the D-loop appears to vary. This implies that selective constraints operate in the mitochondrial D—loop, but understanding how these constraints may determine mitochondrial haplotypes that survive requires further investigation at the molecular and population level. Populations in the Darling River region are known to have been reduced by genocide and introduced disease following European settlement, implying that diversity was reduced. Extension of the study to include populations from further along both the Darling and Murray Rivers is likely to improve our understanding of recent evolutionary processes as reflected in the mitochondrial genome.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Department of Anthropology, 2006.
Bibliography: p. 257-276.
Introduction: coming to Wilcannia -- Wilcannia: plenty of Aborigines, but no culture -- Who you is? -- Cultural values: ambivalences and ambiguities -- Praise, success and opportunity -- "Art an' culture: the two main things, right?" -- Big Murray Butcher: "We still doin' it" -- Granny Moisey's baby: the art of Badger Bates -- Epilogue.
Dominant society discourses and images have long depicted the Aboriginal people of the town of Wilcannia in far Western New South Wales as having no 'culture'. In asking what this means and how this situation might have come about, the thesis seeks to respond through an ethnographic exploration of these discourses and images. The work explores problematic and polemic dominant society assumptions regarding 'culture' and 'Aboriginal culture', their synonyms and their effects. The work offers Aboriginal counter-discourses to the claim of most white locals and dominant culture that the Aboriginal people of Wilcannia have no culture. In so doing the work presents reflexive notions about 'culture' as verbalised and practiced, as well as providing an ethnography of how culture is more tacitly lived. -- Broadly, the thesis looks at what it is to be Aboriginal in Wilcannia from both white and black perspectives. The overarching concern of this thesis is a desire to unpack what it means to be black in Wilcannia. The thesis is primarily about the competing values and points of view within and between cultures, the ways in which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people tacitly and reflexively express and interpret difference, and the ambivalence and ambiguity that come to bear in these interactions and experiences. This thesis demonstrates how ideas and actions pertaining to 'race' and 'culture' operate in tandem through an exploration of values and practices relating to 'work', 'productivity', 'success', 'opportunity' and the domain of 'art'. These themes are used as vehicles to understanding the 'on the ground' effects and affects of cultural perceptions and difference. They serve also to demonstrate the ambiguity and ambivalence that is experienced as well as being brought to bear upon relationships which implicitly and explicitly are concerned with, and concern themselves with difference.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
xii, 276 p. ill

"22nd November, 2006".
Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Dept. of Anthropology, 2007.
Bibliography: leaves 301-330.
Introduction -- Between ourselves -- Two (or three) for the price of one -- Community -- Bits and pieces -- Space painting or painting space -- Talkin' the talk. Bunda bunya miumba (Thundering kangaroos): dancing up a storm -- Welcome to Country: talkin' the talk -- Messing with ceremony -- 'Ethnogenesis' and the emergence of 'darug custodians' -- Conclusion.
The thesis concerns an Aboriginal community, members of which inhabit the western suburbs of Sydney at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This particular group of people has emerged as a cultural group over the last twenty-five years. In other words, the community did not exist before the advent of Aboriginal land rights in Australia. It might be right to suggest that without land rights, native title and state celebrations and inclusions of Aboriginal peoples as multicufturalism, this particular urban community would not and could not exist at all. That, however, would be a simplistic analysis of a complex phenomenon. Land rights and native title provide the beginning of this story. It becomes much more interesting when the people concerned take it up themselves. -- The main foci in the thesis are the cultural forms that this particular community overtly and intentionally produce as articulations of their identity, namely public speaking, dancing, painting and ceremony. I argue that it is only through these yery deliberate collective practices of identity-making that community identity can be produced. This is because the place that the group claims as its own - Sydney - is always already inhabited by 'us' (the dominant society). Analysis of these cultural forms reveals that even if the existence of the group depends on land rights and, attempts to attract the ultimate 'authenticity' bestowed by native title, members of this group are not conforming to native title rules pertinent to what constitutes 'genuine' 'Aboriginality' for the purposes of winning land claims. Their revived traditions are pot what the state prescribes as representative of 'authentic' urban Aboriginal culture. -- The thesis analyses the ways in which urban Aboriginal peoples are makipg themselves in the era and context of native title. It considers the consequences of being themselves.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
xii, 330, [8] leaves ill., maps

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Environmental & Life Sciences, Graduate School of the Environment, 2002.
Includes bibliographical references: p. 228-232.
Geomorphology, archaeology and geoarchaeology: introduction and background -- Surface stone artefact scatters: why can we see them? -- Geomorphic controls on spatial patterning of the surface stone artefact record -- A temporal framework for interpreting surface artefact scatters in Western NSW -- Synthesis: stone artefact scatters in a dynamic landscape.
Surface scatters of stone artefacts are the most ubiquitous feature of the Australian Aboriginal archaeological record, yet the most underutilized by archaeologists in developing models of Aboriginal prehistory. Among the many reasons for this are the lack of understanding of geomorphic processes that have exposed them, and the lack of a suitable chronological framework for investigating Aboriginal 'use of place'. This thesis addresses both of these issues. -- In arid western NSW, erosion and deposition accelerated as a result of the introduction of sheep grazing in the mid 1800s has resulted in exposure of artefact scatters in some areas, burial in others, and complete removal in those parts of the landscape subject to concentrated flood flows. The result is a patchwork of artefact scatters exhibiting various degrees of preservation, exposure and visibility. My research at Stud Creek, in Sturt National Park in far western NSW, develops artefact and landscape survey protocols to accommodate this dynamic geomorphic setting. A sampling strategy stratified on the basis of landscape morphodynamics is presented that allows archaeologists to target areas of maximum artefact exposure and minimum post-discard disturbance. Differential artefact visibility at the time of the survey is accommodated by incorporating measures of surface cover which quantify the effects of various ephemeral environmental processes, such as deposition of sediments, vegetation growth, and bioturbation, on artefact count. -- While surface stone artefact scatters lack the stratigraphy usually considered necessary for establishing the timing of Aboriginal occupation, a combination of radiocarbon determinations on associated heat-retainer ovens, and stratigraphic analysis and dating of the valley fills which underlie the scatters, allows a two-stage chronology for huntergatherer activity to be developed. In the Stud Creek study area, dating of the valley fill by OSL established a maximum age of 2,040±100 y for surface artefact scatters. The heatretainer ovens ranged in age from 1630±30 y BP to 220±55 y BP. Bayesian statistical analysis of the sample of 28 radiocarbon determinations supported the notion, already established from analysis of the artefacts, that the Stud Creek valley was occupied intermittently for short durations over a relatively long period of time, rather than intensively occupied at any one time. Furthermore, a gap in oven building between about 800 and 1100 years ago was evident. Environmental explanations for this gap are explored, but the paiaeoenvironmental record for this part of the Australian arid zone is too sparse and too coarse to provide explanations of human behaviour on time scales of just a few hundred years. -- Having established a model for Stud Creek of episodic landscape change throughout the late Pleistocene and Holocene, right up to European contact, its veracity was evaluated in a pilot study at another location within the region. The length of the archaeological record preserved in three geomorphically distinct locations at Fowlers Gap, 250 km south of Stud Creek, is a function of geomorphic dynamics, with a record of a few hundred years from sites located on channel margins and low terraces, and the longest record thus far of around 5,000 years from high terrace surfaces more remote from active channel incision. But even here, the record is not continuous, and like Stud Creek, the gaps are interpreted to indicate that Aboriginal people moved into and out of these places intermittently throughout the mid to late Holocene. -- I conclude that episodic nonequilibrium characterizes the geomorphic history of these arid landscapes, with impacts on the preservation of the archaeological record. Dating of both archaeological and landform features shows that the landscape, and the archaeological record it preserves, are both spatially and temporally disjointed. Models of Aboriginal hunter-gatherer behaviour and settlement patterns must take account of these discontinuities in an archaeological record that is controlled by geomorphic activity. -- I propose a new geoarchaeological framework for landscape-based studies of surface artefact scatters that incorporates geomorphic analysis and dating of landscapes, as well as tool typology, into the interpretation of spatial and temporal patterns of Aboriginal huntergatherer 'use of place'.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
vii, 232 p. ill., maps

Statistically significant correlations between anthropometric land environmental variables havel I been demonstrated in samples of Holocene Aboriginal crania and mandibles from the east coast of Australia. In testing for variation that may be attributed to climatic adaptation, the model of decreased nasal breadth in colder climates is not supported, but increased cranial breadth is included in principal component scores which correlate with increased latitude and decreased temperatures. Thus the model of increased brachycephalization as a response to decreased temperature is not refuted by these results, but the support demonstrated is secondary to more impressive results for the face and mandibles, for which thermoregulatory explanations have not hitherto been suggested.

"November 2003".
Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Australian Centre for Educational Studies, School of Education, 2004.
Bibliography: leaves 243-267.
Introduction -- Literature review -- Meanings and perspectives of Reconciliation in the Australian socio-political context -- An explanation of the research method -- Meanings of Reconciliation in the school context -- Survey results -- The role of education in the Reconciliation process -- Obstacles and barriers to Reconciliation -- Teaching for Reconciliation: best practice in teaching resources -- Conclusion.
The research detailed in this thesis investigated how schools in NSW responded to the social and political project of Reconciliation at the end of the 1990s. -- The research used a multi-method research approach which included a survey instrument, focus group interviews and key informants interviews with Aboriginal and non Aboriginal teachers, elders and educators, to gather qualitative as well as quantitative data. Differing research methodologies, including Indigenous research paradigms, are presented and discussed within the context of this research. From the initial research questions a number of sub-questions emerged which included: -The exploration of meanings and perspectives of Reconciliation evident in both the school and wider communities contexts and the extent to which these meanings and perspectives were transposed from the community to the school sector. -The perceived level of support for Reconciliation in school communities and what factors impacted on this level of support. -Responses of school communities to Reconciliation in terms of school programs and teaching strategies including factors which enhanced the teaching of Reconciliation issues in the classroom and factors which acted as barriers. -- Firstly in order to provide the context for the research study, the thesis provides a brief historical overview of the creation of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. It then builds a framework through which the discourses of Reconciliation are presented and deconstructed. These various meanings and perspectives of Reconciliation are placed within a linear spectrum of typologies, from 'hard', 'genuine' or 'substantive' Reconciliation advocated by the Left, comprising a strong social justice agenda, first nation rights and compensation for past injustices, to the assimiliationist typologies desired by members of the Right which suggest that Reconciliation is best achieved through the total integration of Aboriginal people into the mainstream community, with Aboriginal people accepting the reality of their dispossession. -- In between these two extremes lie degrees of interpretations of what constitutes Reconciliation, including John Howard's current Federal Government interpretation of 'practical' Reconciliation. In this context "Left" and "Right" are defined less by political ideological lines of the Labor and Liberal parties than by attitudes to human rights and social justice. Secondly, and within the socio-political context presented above, the thesis reports on research conducted with Indigenous and non Indigenous educators, students and elders in the context of the NSW school system to decipher meanings and perspectives on Reconciliation as reflected in that sector. It then makes comparisons with research conducted on behalf of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation during the 1990s on attitudes to Reconciliation in the community. Perceived differences are analysed and discussed.
The research further explores how schools approached the teaching of Reconciliation through a series of survey questions designed to document the types of activities undertaken by the schools with Reconciliation as the main aim. -- Research findings indicated that while both the community at large and the education community are overwhelmingly supportive of Reconciliation, both as a concept and as a government policy, when questioned further as to the depth and details of this commitment to Reconciliation and the extent to which they may be supportive of the 'hard' issues of Reconciliation, their views and level of support were more wide ranging and deflective. -- Findings indicated that, in general, educators have a more multi-layered understanding of the issues related to Reconciliation than the general community, and a proportion of them do articulate more clearly those harder, more controversial aspects of the Reconciliation process (eg just compensation, land and sea rights, customary laws). However, they are in the main, unsure of its meaning beyond the 'soft' symbolic acts and gatherings which occur in schools. In the late 1990s, when Reconciliation was at the forefront of the national agenda, research findings indicate that while schools were organising cultural and curriculum activities in their teaching of Indigenous history or Aboriginal studies - they did not specifically focus on Reconciliation in their teaching programs as an issue in the community. Teachers did not have a clearly defined view of what Reconciliation entailed and schools were not teaching about Reconciliation directly within their curriculum programs. -- The research also sought to identify facotrs which acted as enhancers of a Reconciliation program in schools and factors which were seen as barriers. Research findings clearly pointed to community and parental attitudes as important barriers with time and an overcrowded curriculum as further barriers to the implementation of teaching programs. Factors which promoted Reconciliation in schools often related to human agency and human relationships such as supportive executive leadership, the work of committed teachers and a responsive staff and community.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
xvi, 286 leaves ill

This thesis examines the material correlates of religious behaviour. Religion is an important part of every culture, but the impact religion has on structuring material culture is not well understood. Archaeologists are hampered in their reconstructions of the past because they lack comparative methods and universal conventions for identifying religious behaviour. The principal aim of this thesis is to construct an indicator model which can archaeologically identify religious behaviour. The basis for the proposed model stems directly from recurrent religious phenomena. Such phenomena, according to anthropological and cognitive research, relate to a series of spatio-temporally recurrent religious features which relate to a universal foundation for religious concepts. Patterns in material culture which strongly correlate with these recurrent phenomena indicate likely concentrations of religious behaviour. The variations between sacred and mundane places can be expected to yield information regarding the way people organise themselves in relation to how they perceive their cosmos. Using cognitive religious theory, stemming from research in neurophysiology and psychology, it is argued that recurrent religious phenomena owe their replication to the fact that certain physical stimuli and spatial concepts are most easily interpreted by humans in religious ideas. Humans live in a world governed by natural law, and it is logical that the concepts generated by humans will at least partially be similarly governed. Understanding the connection between concept and cause results in a model of behaviour applicable to cross-cultural analysis and strengthens the model’s assumption base. In order to test the model of religious behaviour developed in this thesis it is applied to a regional archaeological matrix from the Blue Mountains National Park in New South Wales, Australia. Archaeological research in the Blue Mountains has tentatively identified ceremonial sites based on untested generalised associations between select artefact types and distinctive geographic features. The method of analysis in this thesis creates a holistic matrix of archaeological and geographic data, encompassing both qualitative and quantitative measures, which generates a statistical norm for the region. Significant liminal deviations from this norm, which are characteristic indicators of religious behaviour are then identified. Confidence in these indicators’ ability to identify ceremonial sites is obtained by using a distance matrix and algorithms to examine the spatial patterns of association between significant variables. This thesis systematically tests the associations between objects and geography and finds that a selective array and formulaic spatiality of material correlates characteristic of religious behaviour does exist at special places within the Blue Mountains. The findings indicate a wide spread if more pocketed distribution of ceremonial sites than is suggested in previous models. The spatial/material relationships for identified religious sites indicates that these places represent specialised extensions of an interdependent socio-economic system where ceremonial activity and subsistence activity operated in balance and were not isolated entities.

Doctor of Philosophy
This thesis examines the material correlates of religious behaviour. Religion is an important part of every culture, but the impact religion has on structuring material culture is not well understood. Archaeologists are hampered in their reconstructions of the past because they lack comparative methods and universal conventions for identifying religious behaviour. The principal aim of this thesis is to construct an indicator model which can archaeologically identify religious behaviour. The basis for the proposed model stems directly from recurrent religious phenomena. Such phenomena, according to anthropological and cognitive research, relate to a series of spatio-temporally recurrent religious features which relate to a universal foundation for religious concepts. Patterns in material culture which strongly correlate with these recurrent phenomena indicate likely concentrations of religious behaviour. The variations between sacred and mundane places can be expected to yield information regarding the way people organise themselves in relation to how they perceive their cosmos. Using cognitive religious theory, stemming from research in neurophysiology and psychology, it is argued that recurrent religious phenomena owe their replication to the fact that certain physical stimuli and spatial concepts are most easily interpreted by humans in religious ideas. Humans live in a world governed by natural law, and it is logical that the concepts generated by humans will at least partially be similarly governed. Understanding the connection between concept and cause results in a model of behaviour applicable to cross-cultural analysis and strengthens the model’s assumption base. In order to test the model of religious behaviour developed in this thesis it is applied to a regional archaeological matrix from the Blue Mountains National Park in New South Wales, Australia. Archaeological research in the Blue Mountains has tentatively identified ceremonial sites based on untested generalised associations between select artefact types and distinctive geographic features. The method of analysis in this thesis creates a holistic matrix of archaeological and geographic data, encompassing both qualitative and quantitative measures, which generates a statistical norm for the region. Significant liminal deviations from this norm, which are characteristic indicators of religious behaviour are then identified. Confidence in these indicators’ ability to identify ceremonial sites is obtained by using a distance matrix and algorithms to examine the spatial patterns of association between significant variables. This thesis systematically tests the associations between objects and geography and finds that a selective array and formulaic spatiality of material correlates characteristic of religious behaviour does exist at special places within the Blue Mountains. The findings indicate a wide spread if more pocketed distribution of ceremonial sites than is suggested in previous models. The spatial/material relationships for identified religious sites indicates that these places represent specialised extensions of an interdependent socio-economic system where ceremonial activity and subsistence activity operated in balance and were not isolated entities.

This thesis challenges the long-standing convention within Australian historiography whereby ‘Aborigines’ and ‘convicts’ have been treated as two distinct categories. It identifies the points at which these descriptors converge, that is, in the bodies of Aboriginal men from New South Wales sentenced to banishment or transportation. It locates their experiences on a trajectory extending from the early part of the nineteenth century through to the formative middle decades during which the rationale underpinning the trial and transportation of Aboriginal men was refined by the colonial state. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century colonial governors occasionally exercised their prerogative to banish Aboriginal men considered fomenters of hostilities against the colonists. However, they were constrained from making public examples of such men by way of staging trials as early legal opinion railed against doing so. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century colonial discourses constructing Aborigines as British subjects were deployed to argue for the sameness of Aboriginal and white subjects before the law. The perverse corollary of affording Aboriginal people protection under the law was that they also became accountable under colonial laws whose functions were often well outside their ambit of experience. This thesis argues that advocating equal treatment for all served to naturalise the disadvantages faced by Aboriginal defendants in the colonial courtroom thus facilitating trials described as farcical by some contemporaneous commentators. It demonstrates that situating Aboriginal people as British subjects facilitated the criminalisation of some acts that might otherwise be read as political resistance as it was reasoned that one cohort of British subjects could not be considered to be at war with other British subjects. Paradoxically, atypical treatment of Aboriginal people both within and beyond the courtroom was predicated on notions of difference. This led, for example, to the employment of court interpreters to facilitate the trials of Aboriginal defendants. Difference also informed official edicts eventually issued in relation to Aboriginal deaths in custody later in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Most of all, notions of difference underpinned the rationale of exemplary sentencing that saw sixty Aboriginal men from New South Wales incorporated into the convict system during the first half of the nineteenth century as a strategy to subdue not only the captives but also their respective communities. Tellingly, no Aboriginal women became convicts. It was men, not women, who colonists considered to be martial enemies.

This thesis presents a coherent body of research that investigates the theories that underpin the practice of welfare practitioners working with Aboriginal people in the New South Wales child protection system, and explores the impact of a professional training program built on trauma theory. The forcible separation of Indigenous children from their families as the result of past government policy and assimilation laws resulted in collective, historical and intergenerational trauma, which is evident in Aboriginal communities today. The concept of trauma provides a framework that gives a name to, and a language that makes sense of, the experience of the Stolen Generations and their descendants. At its core is the requirement that the stories of Indigenous people be heard, understood and ultimately acknowledged as trauma. Without an understanding of the dynamics of collective, historical and intergenerational trauma and an ability to respond appropriately to it, even the most wellmeaning practitioner is at risk of continuing to perpetrate trauma on successive generations of Indigenous children and their families. To date, the notion of collective, historical and intergenerational trauma has been slow to gain traction in relation to Indigenous people forcibly removed and their descendants. Indigenous people continue to experience judgement and blame for their ongoing disadvantage. The absence of an alternative narrative that acknowledges the traumatic experiences of Indigenous Australians means that racist attitudes and behaviours remain embedded consciously and unconsciously in the dominant culture. The significant over-representation of Indigenous children in the child protection sector makes it imperative that welfare practitioners receive high quality, ongoing training to support appropriate child protection practice and develop relevant trauma informed interventions. There is an urgency to ensure that training is not just provided, but is provided in a way that improves knowledge, skills and understanding, is rigorously evaluated, and leads to improved practice.

Aside from notable exceptions, the nature and variety of Indigenous participation in Australian settler economies has been largely neglected in the anthropological and historical literature. In the Eurobodalla region of the New South Wales south coast, there has been a significant disjuncture in the regional literature between anglocentric local histories, and research that acknowledges Aboriginal people through historical investigations or through the collection of oral histories. There is also a significant gap in the anthropological literature between the early ethnographies, specific studies on Aboriginal labour and social conditions that were biased by ideological presuppositions, and recent work undertaken in relation to judicial processes. This thesis combines theorising of intercultural domains with a utili sation of notions of economic hybridity to examine the history of settler-Indigenous relations in the Eurobodalla and the character of emergent complexes of transactions that entailed a highly plural range of intercultural interactions, which transformed both Indigenous and settler subjectivities. The thesis is grounded in historical and local specificity while it places 'the local' within a broader geopolitical context. Drawing on both anthropological and historical approaches, the thesis argues that present socioeconomic conditions in south coast Aboriginal communities can only be understood through the broader historical context. The thesis examines the highly localised character of the changes brought about by European colonisation and the gradual expansion of the settler economy in the Eurobodalla during the early-mid 19th century. Aboriginal people were drawn into the emerging settler economy through reciprocal relationships of labour, while the presence of settlers was also incorporated into pre-existing, dynamic patterns of economy and sociality. The evidence suggests that semi-nomadic patterns of mobility persisted well into the 20th century, despite the efforts of the Aborigines Protection Board to curtail this movement. The period between the 1940s and 1970s is remembered as a relatively bounded era in which Aboriginal families were both on the run from ' the welfare', and following patterns of seasonal movement (or 'beats'). Aboriginal people were broadly employed in forestry work and seasonal vegetable picking until both industries collapsed in the late 1970s. Through a range of factors, including industry decline, increases in Indigenous political agency, the provision of town housing, welfare and citizenship entitlements and generational change, Aboriginal people in the Eurobodalla have experienced a fraught transition to the era of so-called 'self determination'. The thesis also seeks to 'muddy the waters' of some widespread, but erroneous, generalisations about settler-Indigenous relations and the manifestation of government policies. It identities several historical moments (or processes) that are comparable to trajectories of settler-Indigenous relations elsewhere in Australia. In doing so, this thesis makes a contribution to knowledge by providing a localised and historically situated case study o f settler-Indigenous relations. Research of this type has the potential to mediate the extreme positions generated by the ' history wars'.

When the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission tabled Bringing them home, its report into the separation of indigenous children from their families, it was criticised for failing to consider Indigenous child welfare within the context of contemporary standards. Non-Indigenous people who had experienced out-of-home care also questioned why their stories were not recognised. This thesis addresses those concerns, examining the origins and history of the welfare systems of NSW and Tasmania between 1880 and 1940. Tasmania, which had no specific policies on race or Indigenous children, provides fruitful ground for comparison with NSW, which had separate welfare systems for children defined as Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This thesis draws on the records of these systems to examine the gaps between ideology and policy and practice. The development of welfare systems was uneven, but there are clear trends. In the years 1880 to 1940 non-Indigenous welfare systems placed their faith in boarding-out (fostering) as the most humane method of caring for neglected and destitute children, although institutions and juvenile apprenticeship were never supplanted by fostering. Concepts of child welfare shifted from charity to welfare; that is, from simple removal to social interventions that would assist children's reform. These included education, and techniques to enlist the support of the child's family in its reform. The numbers of non-Indigenous children taken into care were reduced by economic and environmental measures, such as payments to single mothers. The NSW Aborigines Protection Board dismissed boarding-out as an option for Indigenous children and applied older methods, of institutionalisation and apprenticeship, to children it removed from reserves. As non-Indigenous welfare systems in both states were refined, the Protection Board clung to its original methods. It focussed on older children, whilst allowing reserves to deteriorate, and reducing the rights of Aboriginal people. This cannot simply be explained by race, for Tasmania did not adopt the same response. This study shows that the policies of the Aborigines Protection Board were not consonant with wider standards in child welfare of the time. However, the common thread between Indigenous and non-Indigenous child removal was the longing of children and their families for each other.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
In contrast to the large amount of research published on the Aboriginal history of early Sydney, the Aboriginal history of the Central Coast just to the north has received little scholarly attention. Possible perceptions that the region is and was of little importance, or that relevant documentation is lacking, are not supported by the evidence. Examination of a wide variety of recent botanical, geological and archaeological findings reveals that the Central Coast held a significant place in the Aboriginal world, possibly eclipsing that of Sydney, and that it provided an environment with abundant resources in which Aboriginal people flourished. Further, analysis of the large number of newspaper reports, government documents and settler reminiscences from the colonial period which make reference to the traditional Aboriginal owners of the region, now known as the Central Coast Darkinjung, allows a well-informed account of their recent history. These various sources show that the initially numerous Darkinjung people were almost certainly decimated by the waves of disease which followed the arrival of the British in 1788, and that the spirit of those who survived was then all but broken by the capture, trial and incarceration of key leaders in a unique, allegedly humanitarian experiment overseen by Governor Sir Richard Bourke in the 1830s. Although a few of those imprisoned eventually returned home, disease, exposure and despair led to the supposed extinction of the Aboriginal people of the Central Coast in 1874. However, several women had survived and produced children so that the Central Coast Darkinjung continue to the present day. This thesis fills a gap in the story of the colonisation of Australia, acknowledges the role of the Central Coast as pivotal in Aboriginal economy and spirituality, and creates a much-needed narrative framework for further, more specific research on the region’s Aboriginal history.

Thesis (PhD)-- Macquarie University, Division of Environmental and Life Sciences, Dept. of Chemistry and Biomolecular Science. 2006.
Bibliography: p. 229-249.
Ch. 1. Introduction -- ch. 2. An ethnobotanical study with the Kamilaroi and Muruwari Aboriginal communities and relationship building -- ch. 3. Biological assay methods and optimisation -- ch. 4. Ethnopharmacological study of Eremophila sturtii -- ch. 5. Ethnopharmacological study of Exocarpos aphyllus -- ch. 6. General conclusions -- Appendices.
This study covered the documentation of first-hand medicinal plant knowledge of Aboriginal communities in northern New South Wales through the isolation and characterisation of bioactive compounds from Aboriginal medicinal plants.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
xx, 249 p. col. ill., maps, ports

The Upper Nepean River catchment in the Sydney Basin has a rich repertoire of visual imagery - rock-art, and a variety of other types of marks on stone. This thesis examines the diversity and spatial distribution across the land of these rock markings and change over time. The theoretical focus is on materiality, practice and performance. In previous research conducted in the Sydney Basin, rock-art located in shelters has been considered, at least implicitly, to be functionally equivalent across both space and time. The research in this thesis, by comparison, has been developed to explore both synchronic and diachronic variability in sheltered rock-art and to give consideration to the occupational and contextual diversity this represents. The rock-art corpus is analysed in accordance with its material diversity in order to explore the qualitatively different forms of behavioural expression that this variation may embody. A fundamental distinction is made between graphically structured, imposed form on the one hand, and gestural marks on the other. The material relationship between the rock-art and the rock on and within which it is set, is also examined. The different data sets are explored dialectically and in accordance with their geographic and environmental location in order to gain an appreciation of the experience and engagement between Aboriginal people and the land in this part of the Sydney Basin. The analysis employs both quantitative and explicitly narrative approaches to examine the spatial and temporal dimensions of occupation. While this research has been conducted without the support of any direct dating or archaeological context, the methodology has, nevertheless allowed for the discrimination of temporal diversity in spatial patterns, and concomitantly, the manner in which the land has been occupied and created as landscape, over time. In order to achieve this, it has been crucial to analyse the rock markings not only in respect of their behaviour correlates, but also their material locations within geographic, environmental and micro-topographic space. The analysis of the Upper Nepean rock-art reveals a pattern of diachronic change in which the marking of the land with imagery became increasingly diverse in a number of formal and material ways, and geographically and environmentally common and widespread. The results suggests that regional bodies of rock-art are likely to have been produced in accordance with a diversity of motivations and functional purposes and that significant temporal change in the impetus to mark the land, and the choice of how and where to do so, can occur over relatively short time frames. It is argued that the practice of marking the land in the Upper Nepean was a dynamic dialectic, both constitutive and transformative, of being and place. Over time, people drew the land into an object world which became, with ever increasing inscription and embellishment, a marked and painted landscape, both productive of and reflecting, a complex history.

Australia has come to a critical point in its identity as a nation, that is, acknowledging its Aboriginal peoples - Australia's first people - as an intrinsic part of what it is to be Australian. That means respecting Australia's history which includes Australia's first people's histories in our studies, and in the fabric of who we are. It also includes Aboriginal students, achieving educational outcomes commensurate with their non-Aboriginal peers. The New South Wales Department of Education and Training (NSW DET) Aboriginal education policies, along with the national Aboriginal education policies and a whole host of reports, have identified that for a complexity of reasons, non-Aboriginal Australian's have nurtured prejudices and out-dated misconceptions about Aboriginal Australians. These reports and policies have therefore recommended that all Australian school students be taught the truth about Australia's Aboriginal past from colonisation to the present, to learn how the past shaped the present, and to walk together to shape the future. Teaching Aboriginal Studies and integrating Aboriginal perspectives by incorporating Aboriginal history, culture, and values into the school's curriculum has been a challenge for NSW DET. Whilst teachers are expected to teach Aboriginal Studies and integrate Aboriginal perspectives, many lack knowledge about Aboriginal history and culture, many have never met an Aboriginal person, and many pre-service teachers have not been taught the knowledge, skills, and understandings to effectively teach Aboriginal Studies and Aboriginal students as a component of their teacher education courses. Of the pre-service teachers who have experienced Aboriginal Studies teacher education core courses, a paucity of research has been conducted to explicate the nature, value, and impact of these courses. The overarching purpose of this thesis was to assemble an evidence-based rationale, which includes the voices of multiple stakeholders, to test the extent to which core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education courses are vital to improving educational outcomes for Aboriginal children, advancing reconciliation, and creating a more socially just society. To address this purpose, the present investigation critically analysed multiple stakeholders' self-perceptions of the value, nature, success, and impact of core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education courses.