In the early 1970s, Australian governments began to treat Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as 'peoples' with capacities for self-government. Forty years later, confidence in Indigenous self-determination has been eroded by accounts of Indigenous pathology, of misplaced policy optimism and persistent socio-economic 'gaps'. In this collection of new and revised essays, Tim Rowse accounts for this shift by arguing that Australian thinking about 'Indigenous' is a continuing, unresolvable tussle between the idea of 'peoples' and 'population'.

Rowse's essays offer snapshots of moments in the last forty years in which we can see these tensions: between honouring the heritage and quantifying the disadvantage, between acknowledging colonisation's destruction and projecting Indigenous recovery from it. Rowse asks not only 'Can a settler colonial state instruct the colonised in the arts of self-government?', but also, 'How could it justify doing anything less?'

Production Details

• Paperback
• 230mm x 155mm x 17mm
• 224pp
• Released August 2012
• ISBN 9781922059161

Contents

Foreword by Fr Frank Brennan
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Recognising ‘Populations’ and ‘Peoples’
Chapter 1: Recognising ‘Peoples’ and ‘Populations’
Part II: Evoking People-hood
Chapter 2: Hasluck and Elkin
Chapter 3: Strehlow Damns Coombs
Chapter 4: ‘The Whole Aboriginal Problem in Microcosm’- The South Australian Land Rights Debate of 1966
Chapter 5: The Politics of Enumerating the Stolen Generations
Part III: Critical Reflections on Political Capacity
Chapter 6: The Changing Cultural Constitution of the Indigenous Sector
Chapter 7: The Ambivalence of Helen Hughes
Part IV: Thinking Historically About 1967–76
Chapter 8: ‘If We are to Survive as a People …’- Noel Pearson’s Economic History
Chapter 9: Peter Sutton and the Historical Roots of Suffering
Chapter 10: The Coombs Experiment
Part V: The Appeal of Quantification
Chapter 11: The Australian Reconciliation Barometer and the Indigenous Imaginery
Notes
References
Index

About The Cover

Front cover: Op Phase, Ruth Waller, 2009, oil and acrylic on linen, courtesy Watters Gallery.