Bain Attwood
Biographic Data
| ID | 161859 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bain Attwood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bain |
| FAMILY NAME | Attwood |
| SIGNATURE | ATTWOOD B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0130-3161 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies . By Richard Price
In Empire and Indigeneity Richard Price seeks to understand both the nature of the encounter between the British empire and the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand in what he calls the early nineteenth century, and the consequences and legacies of that encounter for these countries as well as British imperial culture more generally. In doing so, he challenges both popular historical accounts that interpret the history of colonialism b…
‘The great principle’
On Wednesday 15 December 1886, on the last hectic day of that year’s parliamentary session of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, a bill to amend major legislation concerning Aborigines was hastily considered. The bill passed without any debate of its main principles; the only concern lay in a few clauses which gave the Board more control over Aborigines on the reserves, and these illiberal measures were struck out. Some of the assumptions underl…
‘In the name of all my coloured brethren and sisters’
When Bessy Flower was born in the early 1850s in the small remote town of Albany in the south-west of Western Australia, some of the Aborigines there, the Nyungar, had already moved into European settlement more or less permanently. Just as Matilda had been baptised and named, Bessy was given her European name by the Camfields, probably after one of Henry&s;s sisters, Elizabeth or Bessy. When Bessy returned from Lake Tyers and started back in the…
‘The making of the Aborigines’
‘In accordance with the custom’
Aborigines reacted in accordance with their own historical experience and tradition, while various contradictions and problems besetting the missionary order helped to perpetuate something like their customary patterns, as did some Europeans outside the mission enclaves. The missionaries’ ordering of time had its basis in the culture and economy of the European agricultural revolution, and was oriented to the future: one planted crops and tended …
‘White man’s laws’
In this chapter, a range of racial attitudes are considered by way of a study of relations between Aborigines and Europeans in one area between the 1850s and the 1900s. Like other civilising agents, William Thomas was also concerned to preach ‘against the crime of drunkenness’ and teach them ‘white man’s laws’, in particular what he called ‘the equity of our laws against one taking the life of another’. Thomas, missionaries and the Central Board …
‘And God said … let them have dominion’
It is less well known, though, that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many of the indigenes faced a second onslaught, from agents of European ‘civilisation’ who sought to change and reshape their minds and hearts, making them anew. At the very least, many seem to have realised that they could only succeed if the Aborigines’ cultural order was fundamentally destroyed. By the 1870s, the missionaries on Ramahyuck had more or less suc…
Rights, Duties and Aboriginal People
In this paper I reconsider debates in the Australian colonies in the 1830s and 1840s about Aboriginal people and rights in land. I contend that Aboriginal rights of property in land were seldom the matter at stake in these debates. Further, I argue that a notion of duties rather than rights was invoked by Christian humanitarians as they pleaded that Aboriginal people should be provided with protection as well as compensation for the loss of their…
Rights for Aborigines
Still me talk long Gurindji
Looking the other way: Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s Younger Sons and denial in Australian history
In recent years Australian historians have begun to show the ways in which Australia’s black history has simultaneously been concealed and disclosed over a long period of time. This article focuses on one such example of this phenomenon – a 1937 fictionalised family history by the Western Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman – and seeks to uncover the unusual set of biographical, historical, intellectual and generic factors that spurred her…
The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century
In recent decades a large amount of scholarship has been devoted to the task of explaining the ways in which European powers claimed possession of indigenous people's territories across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This research has emphasised the role of the law in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. But more work is required to establish the precise roles that the law played in the claiming of land and to measure i…
The Making of the Aborigines
Before 1788, the peoples of this continent did not consider themselves 'Aboriginal'. They only became 'Aborigines' in the wake of the British invasion. In this startling and original study, Bain Attwood reveals how relationships between black Australians and European colonisers determined the hearts and minds of the indigenous peoples, making them anew as Aboriginals.In examining the period after the 'killing times', this young historian provides…
Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People
"In 1981 a novel question was addressed by an Australian historian, more or less for the first time. Why had the British Crown denied - or failed to recognise - the Aboriginal people's sovereignty and rights in land? Alan Frost argued that this occurred because the British government acted in accordance with the international legal conventions of the mid-eighteenth century, or more especially a particular legal decorum called terra nullius, a Lat…
The National Gallery of Victoria’s Colony and Difficult History
A recent exhibition staged by the National Gallery of Victoria Australia can be regarded as an expression of the international difficult histories boom. In large part, its representation in Colony of Australia’s black history is in keeping with the Manichean accounts that have come to dominate in the realm of popular culture and is a function of its decision to represent the past in forms that are primarily memorial and performative rather than h…
Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia
Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia." Australian Historical Studies, 50(1), pp. 128–129
Settler Histories and Indigenous Pasts: New Zealand and Australia
This chapter focuses on historical writing in New Zealand and Australia, which has been transformed since 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the number of academic historians increased exponentially and growing professionalization occurred, a project of constructing a progressive story of masculinist nation-making and nationalism became dominant, while in the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of historians—many of them women and first-generatio…
Protection and Empire: A Global History
Denial in a Settler Society: The Australian Case
In this article I assume that denial is particularly marked in settler societies since their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples and they have never experienced any event like those that have forced other nations to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. Examining the case of Australia I argue that there are intriguing connections between historical denial and contemp…
History, Law and Aboriginal Title
In the closing decades of the twentieth century indigenous peoples in the Anglophone settler societies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand made headlines as they drew attention to the dispossession they had suffered as a result of British colonization. The seizing of territory on the frontiers of settlement by British colonizers had been at the heart of these settler nations which had come to regard colonization as just and to treat the disposse…
Law, History and Power: The British Treatment of Aboriginal Rights in Land in New South Wales
In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land i…
Difficult Histories
In recent decades many democracies around the world have tried to meet growing political demands to make amends for past wrongs by showing their troubling pasts. Museums, especially new national museums, have performed a crucial role in this historical work. In this article I examine the attempt of one of these, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, to stage an exhibit about a historic agreement between the indigenous Maori people and the …
The founding of Aboriginal History and the forming of Aboriginal history
Nearly 40 years ago an important historical project was launched at The Australian National University (ANU). It came to be called Aboriginal history. It was the name of both a periodical and a historiographical movement. In this article I seek to provide a comprehensive account of the founding of the former and to trace something of the formation
Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title
In the closing decades of the twentieth century many scholars sought to both address and redress the ways in which indigenous people's rights in land had been treated historically by colonisers in Anglophone settler societies. More recently, this work has been criticised by a new generation of legal historians who have sought to delineate more carefully the role that the law actually played in the treatment of aboriginal title in the past. In kee…
The Stolen Generations and genocide: Robert Manne’s In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right
In recent years many Australians have been troubled over two words or terms, the Stolen Generations and genocide, and no more so than when they have appeared in tandem, as they did in the report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal children, Bringing Them Home, 1 and the inquiry that gave rise to it. 2 Subsequently many conservatives have increased their attacks upon so-called black armb…
The Making of the Aborigines
Before 1788, the peoples of this continent did not consider themselves 'Aboriginal'. They only became 'Aborigines' in the wake of the British invasion. In this startling and original study, Bain Attwood reveals how relationships between black Australians and European colonisers determined the hearts and minds of the indigenous peoples, making them anew as Aboriginals.In examining the period after the 'killing times', this young historian provides…
The Law of the Land or the Law of the Land: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society
This article considers the influence of a controversial historical work on the law, politics and society of a settler nation. It argues that the impact of Henry Reynolds's 1987 The Law of the Land on legal consideration of indigenous rights to land in Australia can be attributed to the fact that it is best described as juridical history. As such, it told a lego‐historical story that provided the High Court of Australia with a new way of interpret…
In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, "Distance," and Public History
Research Article| January 01 2008 In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, "Distance," and Public History Bain Attwood Bain Attwood Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2008) 20 (1): 75–95. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-017 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Bain Attwood; In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, "Distance," and …
Portrait of an aboriginal as an artist: Sally Morgan and the construction of aboriginality
(1992). Portrait of an aboriginal as an artist: Sally Morgan and the construction of aboriginality. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 25, No. 99, pp. 302-318
Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People
"In 1981 a novel question was addressed by an Australian historian, more or less for the first time. Why had the British Crown denied - or failed to recognise - the Aboriginal people's sovereignty and rights in land? Alan Frost argued that this occurred because the British government acted in accordance with the international legal conventions of the mid-eighteenth century, or more especially a particular legal decorum called terra nullius, a Lat…
Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia
Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia." Australian Historical Studies, 50(1), pp. 128–129
The Paradox of Australian Aboriginal History
Aborigines and academic historians: Some recent encounters∗
For their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940. By Anna Haebich. University of Western Australian Press, Nedlands 1988. Pp. xviii & 413. 517.50 paper. ’Born in the Cattle’: Aborigines in Cattle Country. By Ann McGrath. Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1987. Pp. xi + 200. 517.95 paper. Blood From a Stone: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League. Edited by Andrew Markus. Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1988. …
Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title
In the closing decades of the twentieth century many scholars sought to both address and redress the ways in which indigenous people's rights in land had been treated historically by colonisers in Anglophone settler societies. More recently, this work has been criticised by a new generation of legal historians who have sought to delineate more carefully the role that the law actually played in the treatment of aboriginal title in the past. In kee…
Off the mission stations: Aborigines in Gippsland 1860–1890
An account on the lifestyle and activities of some of the Kurnai people of Gippsland between 1860 and 1890, who lived independently away from mission stations, is presented. The manner in which the residents of the mission stations also mingled in the wider community is discussed
The Public Life of History
Unsettling pasts: Reconciliation and history in settler Australia
During the last three or four decades, settler societies have been forced to confront the nature of their colonial histories, as new political movements and new histories have provoked controversy
The) 1967 (referendum) and all that: Narrative and myth, aborigines and Australia∗
This article seeks to explain why the 1967 referendum with reference to Aborißines was and is regarded as important. We contend that its significance did not so much lie in the constitutional changes as in the narrative deployed by its sponsors, who attributed to the referendum a rich symbolic meaning, especially that of citizenship. We further argue that it has been mythologised recently for similar political purposes, and suggest such strategie…
Denial in a Settler Society: The Australian Case
In this article I assume that denial is particularly marked in settler societies since their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples and they have never experienced any event like those that have forced other nations to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. Examining the case of Australia I argue that there are intriguing connections between historical denial and contemp…
The Stolen Generations and genocide: Robert Manne’s In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right
In recent years many Australians have been troubled over two words or terms, the Stolen Generations and genocide, and no more so than when they have appeared in tandem, as they did in the report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal children, Bringing Them Home, 1 and the inquiry that gave rise to it. 2 Subsequently many conservatives have increased their attacks upon so-called black armb…
Aboriginal history, minority histories and historical wounds: The postcolonial condition, historical knowledge and the public life of history in Australia
This article traces the different ways in which the discipline of history has been democratized in the postcolonial context of Australia, and considers the implications of this for historical knowledge and the public life of history as these have been defined by Dipesh Chakrabarty. It does this by examining three distinctive discursive formations, namely Aboriginal history, minority histories, and what Chakrabarty has called historical wounds
Looking the other way: Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s Younger Sons and denial in Australian history
In recent years Australian historians have begun to show the ways in which Australia’s black history has simultaneously been concealed and disclosed over a long period of time. This article focuses on one such example of this phenomenon – a 1937 fictionalised family history by the Western Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman – and seeks to uncover the unusual set of biographical, historical, intellectual and generic factors that spurred her…
The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century
In recent decades a large amount of scholarship has been devoted to the task of explaining the ways in which European powers claimed possession of indigenous people's territories across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This research has emphasised the role of the law in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. But more work is required to establish the precise roles that the law played in the claiming of land and to measure i…
The National Gallery of Victoria’s Colony and Difficult History
A recent exhibition staged by the National Gallery of Victoria Australia can be regarded as an expression of the international difficult histories boom. In large part, its representation in Colony of Australia’s black history is in keeping with the Manichean accounts that have come to dominate in the realm of popular culture and is a function of its decision to represent the past in forms that are primarily memorial and performative rather than h…
Difficult Histories
In recent decades many democracies around the world have tried to meet growing political demands to make amends for past wrongs by showing their troubling pasts. Museums, especially new national museums, have performed a crucial role in this historical work. In this article I examine the attempt of one of these, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, to stage an exhibit about a historic agreement between the indigenous Maori people and the …
The founding of Aboriginal History and the forming of Aboriginal history
Nearly 40 years ago an important historical project was launched at The Australian National University (ANU). It came to be called Aboriginal history. It was the name of both a periodical and a historiographical movement. In this article I seek to provide a comprehensive account of the founding of the former and to trace something of the formation
Tarra Bobby, a Brataualung man
In the last decade biographical writings have provided much-needed Aboriginal accounts of the history of their interaction with Europeans in Australia. Nearly all of these life histories have been oral-based, transmitted by their subjects or by others who have known them. It has been much more difficult to provide voices for individual Aboriginal men and women who lived in the nineteenth century, but several recent essays have shown that it is po…
Aborigines and academic historians: Some recent encounters∗
For their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940. By Anna Haebich. University of Western Australian Press, Nedlands 1988. Pp. xviii & 413. 517.50 paper. ’Born in the Cattle’: Aborigines in Cattle Country. By Ann McGrath. Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1987. Pp. xi + 200. 517.95 paper. Blood From a Stone: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League. Edited by Andrew Markus. Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1988. …
Portrait of an aboriginal as an artist: Sally Morgan and the construction of aboriginality
(1992). Portrait of an aboriginal as an artist: Sally Morgan and the construction of aboriginality. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 25, No. 99, pp. 302-318
The Paradox of Australian Aboriginal History
Aboriginal History
Aboriginal History in the Age of Mabo
The) 1967 (referendum) and all that: Narrative and myth, aborigines and Australia∗
This article seeks to explain why the 1967 referendum with reference to Aborißines was and is regarded as important. We contend that its significance did not so much lie in the constitutional changes as in the narrative deployed by its sponsors, who attributed to the referendum a rich symbolic meaning, especially that of citizenship. We further argue that it has been mythologised recently for similar political purposes, and suggest such strategie…
Thinking Black: William Cooper and The Australian Aborigines League
'Thinking Black' tells the story of William Cooper, one of the most important Aboriginal leaders in Australia's history, and the Australian Aborigines' League. Through petitions to government, letters to other campaigners and organisations, and entreaties to friends and well-wishers, 'Thinking Black' reveals the League's passionate campaign for Aboriginal people's rights, their struggle against dispossession and displacement, the denial of rights…
The Law of the Land or the Law of the Land: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society
This article considers the influence of a controversial historical work on the law, politics and society of a settler nation. It argues that the impact of Henry Reynolds's 1987 The Law of the Land on legal consideration of indigenous rights to land in Australia can be attributed to the fact that it is best described as juridical history. As such, it told a lego‐historical story that provided the High Court of Australia with a new way of interpret…
Unsettling pasts: Reconciliation and history in settler Australia
During the last three or four decades, settler societies have been forced to confront the nature of their colonial histories, as new political movements and new histories have provoked controversy
Rights for Aborigines
In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, "Distance," and Public History
Research Article| January 01 2008 In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, "Distance," and Public History Bain Attwood Bain Attwood Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2008) 20 (1): 75–95. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-017 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Bain Attwood; In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, "Distance," and …
The Public Life of History
The Stolen Generations and genocide: Robert Manne’s In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right
In recent years many Australians have been troubled over two words or terms, the Stolen Generations and genocide, and no more so than when they have appeared in tandem, as they did in the report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal children, Bringing Them Home, 1 and the inquiry that gave rise to it. 2 Subsequently many conservatives have increased their attacks upon so-called black armb…
Tarra Bobby, a Brataualung man
In the last decade biographical writings have provided much-needed Aboriginal accounts of the history of their interaction with Europeans in Australia. Nearly all of these life histories have been oral-based, transmitted by their subjects or by others who have known them. It has been much more difficult to provide voices for individual Aboriginal men and women who lived in the nineteenth century, but several recent essays have shown that it is po…
Off the mission stations: Aborigines in Gippsland 1860–1890
An account on the lifestyle and activities of some of the Kurnai people of Gippsland between 1860 and 1890, who lived independently away from mission stations, is presented. The manner in which the residents of the mission stations also mingled in the wider community is discussed
Aboriginal history, minority histories and historical wounds: The postcolonial condition, historical knowledge and the public life of history in Australia
This article traces the different ways in which the discipline of history has been democratized in the postcolonial context of Australia, and considers the implications of this for historical knowledge and the public life of history as these have been defined by Dipesh Chakrabarty. It does this by examining three distinctive discursive formations, namely Aboriginal history, minority histories, and what Chakrabarty has called historical wounds
Law, History and Power: The British Treatment of Aboriginal Rights in Land in New South Wales
In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land i…
Difficult Histories
In recent decades many democracies around the world have tried to meet growing political demands to make amends for past wrongs by showing their troubling pasts. Museums, especially new national museums, have performed a crucial role in this historical work. In this article I examine the attempt of one of these, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, to stage an exhibit about a historic agreement between the indigenous Maori people and the …
The founding of Aboriginal History and the forming of Aboriginal history
Nearly 40 years ago an important historical project was launched at The Australian National University (ANU). It came to be called Aboriginal history. It was the name of both a periodical and a historiographical movement. In this article I seek to provide a comprehensive account of the founding of the former and to trace something of the formation
Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title
In the closing decades of the twentieth century many scholars sought to both address and redress the ways in which indigenous people's rights in land had been treated historically by colonisers in Anglophone settler societies. More recently, this work has been criticised by a new generation of legal historians who have sought to delineate more carefully the role that the law actually played in the treatment of aboriginal title in the past. In kee…
History, Law and Aboriginal Title
In the closing decades of the twentieth century indigenous peoples in the Anglophone settler societies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand made headlines as they drew attention to the dispossession they had suffered as a result of British colonization. The seizing of territory on the frontiers of settlement by British colonizers had been at the heart of these settler nations which had come to regard colonization as just and to treat the disposse…
Protection and Empire: A Global History
Denial in a Settler Society: The Australian Case
In this article I assume that denial is particularly marked in settler societies since their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples and they have never experienced any event like those that have forced other nations to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. Examining the case of Australia I argue that there are intriguing connections between historical denial and contemp…
Settler Histories and Indigenous Pasts: New Zealand and Australia
This chapter focuses on historical writing in New Zealand and Australia, which has been transformed since 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the number of academic historians increased exponentially and growing professionalization occurred, a project of constructing a progressive story of masculinist nation-making and nationalism became dominant, while in the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of historians—many of them women and first-generatio…
The National Gallery of Victoria’s Colony and Difficult History
A recent exhibition staged by the National Gallery of Victoria Australia can be regarded as an expression of the international difficult histories boom. In large part, its representation in Colony of Australia’s black history is in keeping with the Manichean accounts that have come to dominate in the realm of popular culture and is a function of its decision to represent the past in forms that are primarily memorial and performative rather than h…
History (30 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Australian History and Society (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Archaeology (14 works) · History (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (11 works)