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Chargement... Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788par Richard Broome
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  Michael_Godfrey | May 29, 2012 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série
The highly regarded history of Australia's First Nations people since colonisation, fully updated for this fifth edition. In the creation of any new society, there are winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew from a colonial outpost to an affluent society. Richard Broome tells the history of Australia from the standpoint of the original Australians: those who lost most in the early colonial struggle for power. Surveying over two centuries of Aboriginal-European encounters, he shows how white settlers steadily supplanted the original inhabitants, from the shining coasts to inland deserts, by sheer force of numbers, disease, technology and violence. He also tells the story of Aboriginal survival through resistance and accommodation, and traces the continuing Aboriginal struggle to move from the margins of a settler society to a more central place in modern Australia. Broome's Aboriginal Australians has long been regarded as the most authoritative account of black-white relations in Australia. This fifth edition continues the story, covering the impact of the Northern Territory Intervention, the mining boom in remote Australia, the Uluru Statement, the resurgence of interest in traditional Aboriginal knowledge and culture, and the new generation of Aboriginal leaders. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)305.89915Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Ethnic and national groups ; racism, multiculturalism Other Groups Pacific OriginClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4)
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Broome sits in a sort of centre-left position on the Aboriginal history spectrum - a little more willing than a Langton or a Moreton-Robinson to acknowledge that one or two on the Right side of history (including some church groups and figures such as Sir William Deane and Malcolm Fraser) have made efforts at human compassion, a little (lot) less likely than a Blainey, a Windschuttle or a Partington to pretend that God is in his European heaven and all was right with might. His footnoted documented evidence is exhaustive, and his narrative powers are consummate.
In the end therefore this 2010 version - a year or two post-apology - is not tragic, at leat in a final, reverberating hopelessness sense of the world. One gets the sense that, for the second time in a sorry tale, signs of hope are abounding. The first era of hope was the second half of the nineteenth century, but that era of radical hope was'quashed', as Broome puts it, by the surge in European nationalism (that greatest of all evils) and related rise in pseudo-scientific idiocies such as Phrenology and Social Darwinism.
The second era of hope emerges from the realms of sports, arts and spirituality, nascent to a non-Aboriginal observer, re-nascent to an Aboriginal person. The movement grew from the boxing rings since the 1930s (think of Lionel Rose, Australian of the year in 1968; Anthony Mundine), from the magnificence of Evonne Goolagong's tennis (Australian of the Year in 1971), the Ella brothers' rugby, right down to and beyond Cathy Freeman's athletic triumphs in 2000 (she was named Australian of the Year in 1998). This second era of hope includes both reclamation of traditional forms of art and dance, emergences of literary excellence (Sally Morgan, of course, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and re-interpetations of musical tradition (Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who was in fact named Australian of the Year in 1978 for his mining negotiations), Mandawuy Yunupingu (Australian of the Year 1992) and (we might now add) Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, and of emergent powerful political forces, such as politican Neville Bonner (Australian of the Year in 1979),and Lowitja O'Donoghue (Australian of the Year in 1984).
I mention Aboriginal figures awarded Australian of the Year recognition because, as Broome notes, these represent a groundswell of favourable attitude in mainstream Australian society, Aboriginal and non Aboriginal alike. The awards and accolades represent a vanguard of change that may not yet be represented satisfactorily in health, education, or income statistics, but which suggest that a magnificent culture far, far more ancient than the European culture that invaded and dominates it may well be re-emerging, adapting to a new world, and poising to triumph over post-modernity despite all but insurmountable difficulties spanning two centuries of oppression.
Party politics have not even remotely always reflected the changing fates of Aboriginal Australians (the Labor party and trades union were, until the 1950s, abysmally opposed to equality of opportunity or remuneration for Aboriginal workers), but as the era of optimism best symbolised by the Kevin Rudd National Apology faces almost inevitable changes of federal government in the near future it is to be hoped that the groundswell of Aboriginal pride and (in terms comparative to the past) well-being are greater than the chambers of Canberra. The Intervention stands to remind us that divide, conquer and paternalise are not just historical processes. Broome does not reflect much on the future - he is an historian, not a prophet. It is though to be hoped that this time around the tide of radical hope for Aborinal people is unstoppable.
Only a slightly meagre and strangely compartmentalized bibliography mars this magnificent account of a sorry tale. (