R Mcgregor
Biographic Data
| ID | 3619 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Mcgregor |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgregor |
| SIGNATURE | MCGREGOR R |
| AFFILIATIONS | James Cook University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0033-9242 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Roger Tory Peterson Down Under
The American, Roger Tory Peterson, has been the single most influential figure in the evolution of birding field guides around the world. He was also a major contributor to the awakening of an environmental consciousness among the wider public in the second half of the twentieth century. In Australia, he provided a powerful impetus to the renovation of the field guide genre from the 1960s onward; and his Australian followers, like Peterson himsel…
J. A. Leach’s Australian Bird Book
An Australian Bird Book by J. A. Leach, published in 1911, was the first field guide to Australia’s avifauna. Unlike today’s field guides, it was not tightly focussed on identification, instead devoting more than half its words to an expansive dissertation on the natural history of birds. This article scrutinises and contextualises Leach’s Bird Book to illuminate some of the interconnections between science, birdwatching, recreation and conservat…
Alec Chisholm and the extinction of the Paradise Parrot
Rediscovered in 1921 after several decades of feared extinction, the resurrection of the Paradise Parrot was brief. Within a few decades more, the parrot was actually extinct, making it the only mainland Australian bird species known to have suffered that fate since colonisation. This article explores the reasons for the paucity and ineffectuality of attempts to preserve the species in the interwar years. By examining the contemporary state of or…
Ben Silverstein’s new perspective on the New Deal
Ben Silverstein’s book focuses on one moment of native governance in Australia. The New Deal for Aborigines, issued by Commonwealth Minister for the Interior John McEwen in February 1939, has conve
Disputing the Territory
The Payne-Fletcher Report of 1937 offers an intriguing array of commentary on the environmental attributes of the Northern Territory. It also makes some comments – though far fewer – on the role of Aboriginal people in Territorian life and on the admission of indentured Asian labour. This article sets the report’s commentary on both environmental and racial issues in the context of contemporary anxieties over Australia’s tropical north. It argues…
“People the North”
The People the North Committee, founded in Townsville in 1962, was true to its name. It wanted to treble the population of northern Australia in a decade. Putting people before profits, the committee insisted that Australians had a moral obligation to prolifically populate their northern lands. Neither the ambition nor the rationale was new. In fact, the People the North Committee was the last gasp of a grand demographic aspiration that went back…
Nature Study and Environmental Concern
[Extract] Dorothy Kass's book is a welcome addition to the history of both environmental attitudes and educational reform in Australia. Its primary focus – nature study in schools in the early twentieth century – is a topic few Australian historians have noticed, let alone scrutinised closely as this book does. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, the shaping of environmental attitudes in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia is a field seldo…
Mateship with Nature
Alec Chisholm (1890-1977) inspired generations of Australians to see nature anew. A prolific writer of popular works of natural history, he promoted a conservationist ethos. He also promoted an Australian nationalism that cherished the landscapes, flora and fauna of that country. This article explores the entwining of Chisholm's love of nature with his commitment to Australian nationalism. In doing so, it teases out some of the complexities and a…
The Good Country
The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the Settlers and the Protectors . By Bain Attwood (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017), pp.xiv + 225. AU$29.95 (pb)
Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901
Tim Rowse has a rare talent for making us see things anew. He has done it in earlier books, but his latest takes that talent to new heights. It scrutinises the history of engagements between Indige
Excursions Through Emptiness
During the interwar years, Australians grew increasingly anxious about their sparsely populated north. They had moral qualms about leaving land idle; they felt uneasy about international criticism of their lacklustre efforts in the tropics; they feared a stronger, more resolute nation might rob them of their under-utilised heritage. While anxieties intensified, there was an efflorescence of travel writing on northern Australia, as cars and aeropl…
Environment, Race, and Nationhood in Australia
For seventy years after federation, Australians fretted over the "empty north" of their continent. This book explains why they were worried and how their anxieties about Australia's tropical regions shaped the self-image of the nation. It offers a timely and compelling account of environmental misgivings that still run through debates about Australia's north.
A Dog in the Manger
After the First World War, the unequal distribution of the world’s people became a matter of heightened international concern. In a world desperate to avoid the horrors of another war, differential population pressure—the fact that some parts of the Earth’s surface were crowded to bursting while others were virtually empty—was identified as a (or the) major cause of international conflict. To secure world peace, a more equitable distribution of p…
Modest Projections, Massive Projects
Among the few achievements of the NADC was the creation of a Northern Australian Regional Survey section within the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Agronomist C.S. Christian headed a multidisciplinary team, along with geologist L.C. Noakes, pedologist G.A. Stewart, and botanist S.T. Blake, whose role was to provide scientific data on which developmental decisions could be soundly based. Using an innovative combination of ae…
Just Relations
Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett's Crusade for Aboriginal Rights. By Alison Holland (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2015), pp. xv + 453. AU$45.00 (pb)
Aboriginal Artefacts, Collectors and the Wet Tropics
This introduction raises issues concerning transactions involving Aboriginal artefacts of the North Queensland Wet Tropics. We highlight relationships between artefacts, persons and place, as well as the importance of understanding the nature of exchange and concepts of ownership in the creation and collection of artefacts
Making the Rainforest Aboriginal
In the late 1930s Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell identified the inhabitants of the North Queensland rainforests as a distinct race of Indigenous Australians. This classification was a keystone of their attempted reconstruction of the deep past of Australia. According to their narrative, the Aboriginal inhabitants of the rainforests were relicts of the first human occupants of Australia, refugees from later waves of Aboriginal invaders who sei…
Walter Edmund Roth
Walter Roth ranks among the most prolific collectors of Aboriginal artefacts from North Queensland, including the Wet Tropics, as well as being one of the leading ethnographers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia. He was also one of Queensland’s first official Protectors of Aboriginals, appointed immediately after that colony introduced its now-infamous Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. This paper explo…
Warrior
[Extract] The subtitle suggests that this is a biography. In fact it is only partly that, and the biographical elements are not the most successful aspects of the book. Connors' real achievement lies in her depiction of the collective responses of Aboriginal people to the British intrusion into what is now south-eastern Queensland. Insofar as it is biographical, the book recounts the life of Dundalli, a Dalla man from the Blackall Ranges inland f…
Exhibition Reviews
Developing the North, Defending the Nation? The Northern Australia Development Committee, 1945–1949
The Northern Australia Development Committee (NADC) was established in late 1945 to coordinate the efforts of the Commonwealth, Queensland and Western Australian governments in developing the north of the continent. At the outset, defence considerations were uppermost. However, the NADC soon became entangled in disputes among Commonwealth departments and personalities over the relevance of northern development to national defence. Some — notably …
A Dog in the Manger
Between the world wars Australia was commonly characterised as a dog in the manger for failing to utilise vast tracts of its territory while refusing to relax its stringent restrictions on immigration. This article examines interwar responses to the dog-in-the manger accusation, particularly their implications for the environmental representation of the supposedly empty spaces. I argue that Australians' increasing acceptance of the aridity of the…
Drawing the Local Colour Line
My title paraphrases that of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds's recent book, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Melbourne 2008). As those historians explain, the distinction between white and nonwhite races was drawn with increasing rigour in the three decades or so on either side of 1900. Locally drawn lines, however, could be more substantive, inscribing boundaries across land and sea which confined white and non-white to one side or the other. The…
Artefacts and collectors in the tropics of North Queensland
This paper outlines some of the ways early artefact collecting contributed to the definition of the Australian region now known and marketed as the ‘World Heritage Wet Tropics’. While others have collected in this region, we focus on the collecting activities of Hermann Klaatsch and the work of Norman Tindale to explore some factors that contributed to their claims that certain artefacts represent a region and its history. We argue that these und…
Foreign Bodies
Breed out the colour’ or the importance of being white
This article examines inter‐war proposals to ‘breed out the colour’ of Aborigines of mixed descent. Positioning these proposals in the context of contemporary Australian nationalism, scientific discourses and administrative practice, the article concludes with a discussion of their alleged genocidal intent
The Doomed Race
Anthropologists and other scientific investigators of the Australian Aborigines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries confidently predicted the imminent extinction of the race.Indeed, "confidently predicted" is understating the case.Scientists at the time knew that the Aborigines would soon be extinct.It was taken for granted as a self-evident truth
The necessity of Britishness
Until the last third of the twentieth century, Britishness figured prominently in the national identity of Australians. Many scholars of Australian nationalism have assumed an inherent antipathy between British and Australian solidarities; others have appreciated that there was a degree of mutuality between the two; few have explained why. This article offers such an explanation. It focuses on the crucial nation‐building period twenty years on ei…
Protest and progress
(1993). Protest and progress: Aboriginal activism in the 1930s. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 25, No. 101, pp. 555-568
Intelligent parasitism
[Extract] By 1951 A.P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, had acquired an international academic reputation, as well as being the dommant figure within his discipline in Australia. In that year he published 'Reaction and Interaction: A Food Gathering People and European Settlement in Australia', in which he set out the phases through which the relations between Aborigines and Europeans had supposedly passed since first …
Another Nation
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the emergence of Aboriginal nationalism and an associated decline of activist interest in securing Aboriginal inclusion in the Australian nation. This article positions these changes in the context of disillusionment following the 1967 referendum, the advent of black power and land rights, the radicalisation of youth and the rise of identity politics. It argues that the Aboriginal nationalism of this perio…
Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901
Tim Rowse has a rare talent for making us see things anew. He has done it in earlier books, but his latest takes that talent to new heights. It scrutinises the history of engagements between Indige
Walter Edmund Roth
Walter Roth ranks among the most prolific collectors of Aboriginal artefacts from North Queensland, including the Wet Tropics, as well as being one of the leading ethnographers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia. He was also one of Queensland’s first official Protectors of Aboriginals, appointed immediately after that colony introduced its now-infamous Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. This paper explo…
Warrior
[Extract] The subtitle suggests that this is a biography. In fact it is only partly that, and the biographical elements are not the most successful aspects of the book. Connors' real achievement lies in her depiction of the collective responses of Aboriginal people to the British intrusion into what is now south-eastern Queensland. Insofar as it is biographical, the book recounts the life of Dundalli, a Dalla man from the Blackall Ranges inland f…
Develop the north
[Extract] Develop the north had been a cry of Australian nationalists since the prefederation era. It was part of a larger demand to develop the nation, to provide Australia with the economic and demographic resources requisite for prosperity and defence.1 However, the north (within which term I include the contiguous areas of arid central Australia) had particular pertinence to this national project, since it was there, facing the source of the …
From Old Testament to New
This publication does not have an abstract
Wards, Words and Citizens
This paper explores some of the ambivalences and contestations within assimilationist discourses in mid‐twentieth century Australia. It focuses on the writings of A. P. Elkin, using Paul Hasluck's utterances mainly insofar as they throw Elkin's arguments into sharper relief. While Hasluck's version of assimilation was based on the assumptions of liberal individualism, Elkin drew upon ideas of cultural progress and social anthropology (among other…
Representations of the ‘half‐caste’ in the Australian scientific literature of the 1930s 1
An Absent Negative
This article argues that the absence of a campaign for a ‘no’ vote in the 1967 referendum was crucial not only to its outcome but, more importantly, to its conduct and subsequent commemoration. Not having to face an organised opposition, the campaign for a ‘yes’ vote remained superficial, and its proponents failed to publicly explain either how constitutional amendment could secure Aboriginal citizenship or what that citizenship might entail. For…
Looking across the Tasman
This article explores some ways in which those Australians who sought to advance Aboriginal interests looked to New Zealand for guidance and inspiration during the half‐century from the 1920s to the 1970s. I consider this trans‐Tasman interaction under three headings: parliamentary representation, respect and recognition, and land rights. These, according to Australian activists, Maori possessed and Aborigines lacked. Making up the deficiency, th…
Representations of the ‘half‐caste’ in the Australian scientific literature of the 1930s 1
Protest and progress
(1993). Protest and progress: Aboriginal activism in the 1930s. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 25, No. 101, pp. 555-568
The Doomed Race
Anthropologists and other scientific investigators of the Australian Aborigines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries confidently predicted the imminent extinction of the race.Indeed, "confidently predicted" is understating the case.Scientists at the time knew that the Aborigines would soon be extinct.It was taken for granted as a self-evident truth
The Clear Categories of Olive Pink
This paper explores Olive Pink's writings of the 1930s, with particular emphasis on her stern moral convictions, and her insistence that persons of mixed Aboriginal and other descent were not Aborigines. It suggests that these two issues were linked, and may best be understood in the context of the contemporary preoccupation with saving a race which had long been regarded as doomed to extinction
Intelligent parasitism
[Extract] By 1951 A.P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, had acquired an international academic reputation, as well as being the dommant figure within his discipline in Australia. In that year he published 'Reaction and Interaction: A Food Gathering People and European Settlement in Australia', in which he set out the phases through which the relations between Aborigines and Europeans had supposedly passed since first …
Books
Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. By Alistair Thomson. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994. Pp. vi + 282. $19.95 cloth. The Great War Gains and Losses—ANZAC and Empire. Edited by Craig Wilcox and Janice Aldridge, Australian War Memorial and Australian National University, Canberra, 1995. Pp. xiii + 236. $15.00 paper. Gender and Wan Australians at War in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake. Cambridge University…
Books
Creating Australia: Changing Australian History. Edited by Wayne Hudson and Geoffrey Bolton. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997. Pp. xiii + 187. $24.95 paper. The Europeans in Australia: A History, volume 1, The Beginning. By Alan Atkinson. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997. Pp. xviii + 429. $49.95 cloth. Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship. By John Chesterman and Brian Galligan. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1…
Wards, Words and Citizens
This paper explores some of the ambivalences and contestations within assimilationist discourses in mid‐twentieth century Australia. It focuses on the writings of A. P. Elkin, using Paul Hasluck's utterances mainly insofar as they throw Elkin's arguments into sharper relief. While Hasluck's version of assimilation was based on the assumptions of liberal individualism, Elkin drew upon ideas of cultural progress and social anthropology (among other…
From Old Testament to New
This publication does not have an abstract
Books
Radical Melbourne: A Secret History. By Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow. Melbourne: Vulgar Press, 2001. Pp 223. $44.95 paper. To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity. By Angela Woollacott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 298. $69.95 paper. Making the Australian Male: Middle‐Class Masculinity, 1870–1920. By Martin Crotty. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 301. $38.45 paper. The Murray…
Breed out the colour’ or the importance of being white
This article examines inter‐war proposals to ‘breed out the colour’ of Aborigines of mixed descent. Positioning these proposals in the context of contemporary Australian nationalism, scientific discourses and administrative practice, the article concludes with a discussion of their alleged genocidal intent
Assimilationists contest assimilation
To point out that assimilationists contested assimilation might, at first glance, seem banal. There is never complete unanimity over policy, and still less over practice; there is always disagreement over tactics, pace and procedure. Did contention over assimilation, however, extend beyond mere squabbling over strategy? On the face of it, there is a case to answer. When the linguist T G H Strehlow urged assimilation through strengthening the auth…
Books
Domestic Service in Australia. By B.W. Higman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 358. $49.95 cloth. Our Bodies, Our Babies: The Forgotten Women's Movement. By Kerreen M. Reiger. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Pp. 335. $38.95 paper. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. By Warwick Anderson. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 352. $34.95 paper. Invisible…
Genocide and Settler Society
Develop the north
[Extract] Develop the north had been a cry of Australian nationalists since the prefederation era. It was part of a larger demand to develop the nation, to provide Australia with the economic and demographic resources requisite for prosperity and defence.1 However, the north (within which term I include the contiguous areas of arid central Australia) had particular pertinence to this national project, since it was there, facing the source of the …
Avoiding "Aborigines"
Between 1951 and 1953, Commonwealth Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, oversaw the drafting of an item of Northern Territory legislation that became the Welfare Ordinance, 1953. While in many ways consistent with earlier Aboriginal legislation, in one significant respect it represented a radical innovation since it never once referred to “Aborigines” or any other racial category. This article takes the Welfare Ordinance as the starting point…
The necessity of Britishness
Until the last third of the twentieth century, Britishness figured prominently in the national identity of Australians. Many scholars of Australian nationalism have assumed an inherent antipathy between British and Australian solidarities; others have appreciated that there was a degree of mutuality between the two; few have explained why. This article offers such an explanation. It focuses on the crucial nation‐building period twenty years on ei…
Looking across the Tasman
This article explores some ways in which those Australians who sought to advance Aboriginal interests looked to New Zealand for guidance and inspiration during the half‐century from the 1920s to the 1970s. I consider this trans‐Tasman interaction under three headings: parliamentary representation, respect and recognition, and land rights. These, according to Australian activists, Maori possessed and Aborigines lacked. Making up the deficiency, th…
An Absent Negative
This article argues that the absence of a campaign for a ‘no’ vote in the 1967 referendum was crucial not only to its outcome but, more importantly, to its conduct and subsequent commemoration. Not having to face an organised opposition, the campaign for a ‘yes’ vote remained superficial, and its proponents failed to publicly explain either how constitutional amendment could secure Aboriginal citizenship or what that citizenship might entail. For…
Defining Islam
At a time when many departments of religious studies are expanding their course offerings in Islam, and seeking to integrate Islamic studies into their wider critical conversations on religion, this volume is uniquely welcome. This book is a collection of 24 readings gathered around the critical category Islam. The pieces are from prominent thinkers in their respective areas of specialty and have been well edited, making them all fairly short. Th…
One People
This article uses a series of Commonwealth government assimilation propaganda booklets published between 1957 and 1963 as the starting point for an exploration of the relationship between Aboriginal assimilation policy and changing conceptions of Australian nationhood. It argues that the ethnic nationalism that provided the foundations of the White Australia policy in the federation era, and of Aboriginal policy for much of the interwar period, w…
Another Nation
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the emergence of Aboriginal nationalism and an associated decline of activist interest in securing Aboriginal inclusion in the Australian nation. This article positions these changes in the context of disillusionment following the 1967 referendum, the advent of black power and land rights, the radicalisation of youth and the rise of identity politics. It argues that the Aboriginal nationalism of this perio…
Artefacts and collectors in the tropics of North Queensland
This paper outlines some of the ways early artefact collecting contributed to the definition of the Australian region now known and marketed as the ‘World Heritage Wet Tropics’. While others have collected in this region, we focus on the collecting activities of Hermann Klaatsch and the work of Norman Tindale to explore some factors that contributed to their claims that certain artefacts represent a region and its history. We argue that these und…
Foreign Bodies
A Dog in the Manger
Between the world wars Australia was commonly characterised as a dog in the manger for failing to utilise vast tracts of its territory while refusing to relax its stringent restrictions on immigration. This article examines interwar responses to the dog-in-the manger accusation, particularly their implications for the environmental representation of the supposedly empty spaces. I argue that Australians' increasing acceptance of the aridity of the…
History (35 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Political science (34 works) · Law (31 works) · Australian History and Society (21 works) · History (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Archaeology (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Geography (14 works)