Master narratives and the dispossession of the Wiradjuri

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11963681
AutoresGaynor McDonald (autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen22
Fecha de publicación2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAboriginal History Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0314-8769 • E-ISSN: 1837-9389
EditorialANU Press (PUBLISHER • AU)
DOI10.22459/ah.22.2011.10
OpenAlexW2241663191
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas11

This paper and the concerns it raises developed from my study of Wiradjuri people's relationships to land, as part of a study of the Wiradjuri Regional Aboriginal Land Council's experiences with the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983. At first, it seemed it would be straightforward to identify practices, values and speech acts through which Wiradjuri people understood and articulated these relationships. But as soon as I started to ask, what does land mean to Wiradjuri people today, I found I was writing defensively rather than descriptively. I was needing to convince, conscious of a refusal 'out there' in the world of potential readership, academic and non-academic, to acknowledge that Wiradjuri people, encapsulated in the centre of New South Wales' agricultural heartland, had any relationships to land after their 180 years' experience of colonisation. This paper does not look at those meanings I wished to write about, except briefly to contextualise my discussion. Instead, I look at the sources of my dis quiet and the larger question which kept confronting me: within what discursive space can one talk about Wiradjuri people having any meanings at all? This discussion takes place within political and theoretical contexts which cur rently debate issues of identity, Aboriginality/indigeneity, authenticity and entitlement. These debates predated but have assumed greater significance since the passing of the Commonwealth Native Title Act in 1993. The issue about who is or is not an 'Aboriginal person' in Australia has plagued policy makers for a century, and a history of changes in official definitions, as well as popular ones, attests to a preoccupation with discover ing palatable criteria at different historical moments for the inclusion or exclusion of 'Aboriginal people' from a right to the benefits of the day (sometimes defined as bene fits Aborigines receive, sometimes which non-Aborigines receive). Even though, since 1972, the Commonwealth Government has recognised the right of self-definition in its requirement that a person who claims to be Aboriginal be of Aboriginal descent and recognised as such by an Aboriginal community, in practice it is clear that there are still different shades of Aboriginality. These are likely to be voiced in terms of the presence or absence of certain cultural attributes (which make people 'real' or 'not real' Aborigi nes) than the previously popular 'biological' ones (full-blood, half-caste, quarter-caste)

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