The Lamb Enters the Dreaming

Author: Robert Kenny
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1921640472
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
The Lamb Enters the Dreaming traces the life of Nathanael Pepper of the Wotjobaluk people, who was born as the first pastoralists were driving cattle and sheep into Victoria’s Wimmera region. In their wake came Christian missionaries, who were just as hostile to the settlers’ violence as they were to the traditional beliefs of Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, Pepper converted to Christianity in 1860. The extraordinary story of Pepper’s conversion, and his subsequent attempts to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable, reveals much about the deeper symbolic and moral forces at work in this collision of cultures. Robert Kenny challenges many orthodoxies in this profound reconsideration of how indigenous people and Europeans thought about each other. He traces Aboriginal attempts to accommodate the ‘people of the sheep’ and their pastoralist totem, Jesus, while arguing that it was European animals more than the settlers themselves that ruptured the Dreaming. On the European side, Kenny argues, increasingly powerful scientific and philosophical challenges undermined evangelical Christianity’s belief that all humanity was of ‘One Blood’. And behind it all lurked the spectre of slavery and the question of the moral order of imperialism. Brilliantly original in conception, and written with a rare lucidity and lightness of touch, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming is a detailed and sensitive exploration of a life, a meditation on the matter of culture and conversion, and a major reappraisal of the relations between Aboriginal and European societies in the first decades of contact in southern Australia.

Talking Sideways

Author: Reg Dodd
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702262110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Reg Dodd grew up at Finniss Springs, on striking desert country bordering South Australia's Lake Eyre. For the Arabunna and for many other Aboriginal people, Finniss Springs has been a homeland and a refuge. It has also been a cattle station, an Aboriginal mission, a battlefield, a place of learning, and a living museum. With his long-time friend and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon, Dodd reflects on his upbringing in a cross-cultural environment that defied social conventions of the time. They also write candidly about the tensions surrounding power, authority, and Indigenous knowledge that have defined the recent decades of this resource-rich area. Talking Sideways is part history, part memoir, and part cultural road-map. Together, Dodd and McKinnon reveal the unique history of this extraordinary place and share their concerns and their hopes for its future.

The Bible in Buffalo Country

Author: Sally K. May
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 176046399X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
Arriving in the remote Arnhem Land Aboriginal settlement of Oenpelli (Gunbalanya) in 1925, Alf and Mary Dyer aimed to bring Christ to a former buffalo shooting camp and an Aboriginal population many whites considered difficult to control. The Bible in Buffalo Country: Oenpelli Mission 1925–1931 represents a snapshot of the tumultuous first six years of the Church Missionary Society’s mission at Oenpelli and the superintendency of Alfred Dyer between 1925 and 1931. Drawing together documentary and photographic sources with local community memory, a story emerges of miscommunication, sickness, constant logistical issues, and an Aboriginal community choosing when and how to engage with the newcomers to their land. This book provides a fascinating and detailed record of the primary sources of the mission, placed alongside the interpretation and insight of local Traditional Owners. Its contents include the historical and archaeological context of the primary source material, the vivid mission reports and correspondence, along with stunning photographs of the mission and relevant maps, and finally the oral history of Esther Manakgu, presenting Aboriginal memory of this complex era. The Bible in Buffalo Country emerged from community desire for access to the source documents of their own history and for their story to be known by the broader Australian public. It is intended for the benefit of communities in western Arnhem Land and is also a rich resource for historians of Aboriginal history (and other scholars in relevant disciplines).

Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies

Author: M. Brett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137475471
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theology focuses on what postcolonial theologies look like in colonial contexts, particularly in dialogue with the First Nations Peoples in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. The contributors have roots in the Asia-Pacific, but the struggles, theologies and concerns they address are shared across the seas.

Disasters that Changed Australia

Author: Richard Evans
Publisher: Victory Books
ISBN: 0522856497
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
From natural phenomenon such as Cyclone Tracy, and the Ash Wednesday and Black Friday fires, to key moments in our military history such as Flanders in 1917, and the fall of Singapore, this is an essential guide to understanding the people, the ideas and the events that defined the course of Australia's history.

Ground Truthing

Author: Paul Carter
Publisher: UWA Publishing
ISBN: 9781742580708
Category : Cultural geography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Australia's evocative Mallee region is rich with histories, impressions and geographical complexities. It Is also a microcosm of a world in turmoil.

The Contest for Aboriginal Souls

Author: Regina Ganter
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760462055
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
This book covers the missionary activity in Australia conducted by non-English speaking missionaries from Catholic and Protestant mission societies from its beginnings to the end of the mission era. It looks through the eyes of the missionaries and their helpers, as well as incorporating Indigenous perspectives and offering a balanced assessment of missionary endeavour in Australia, attuned to the controversies that surround mission history. It means neither to condemn nor praise, but rather to understand the various responses of Indigenous communities, the intentions of missionaries, the agendas of the mission societies and the many tensions besetting the mission endeavour. It explores a common commitment to the supernatural and the role of intermediaries like local diplomats and evangelists from the Pacific Islands and Philippines, and emphasises the strong role played by non-English speakers in the transcultural Australian mission effort. This book is a companion to the website German Missionaries in Australia – A web-directory of intercultural encounters. The web-directory provides detailed accounts of Australian missions staffed with German speakers. The book reads laterally across the different missions and produces a completely different type of knowledge about missions. The book and its accompanying website are based on a decade of research ranging across mission archives with foreign-language sources that have not previously been accessed for a historiography of Australian missions. ‘A remarkable intellectual achievement, compelling reading.’ — Dr Niel Gunson ‘The range of knowledge on display here is very impressive indeed.’ — Professor Peter Monteath

A Bridge Between

Author: Katharine Massam
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760463523
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
A Bridge Between is the first account of the Benedictine women who worked at New Norcia and the first book-length exploration of twentieth-century life in the Western Australian mission town. From the founding of a grand school intended for ‘nativas’, through links to Mexico and Paraguay then Ireland, India and Belgium, as well as to their house in the Kimberley, and a network of villages near Burgos in the north of Spain, this is a complex international history. A Bridge Between gathers a powerful, fragmented story from the margins of the archive, recalling the Aboriginal women who joined the community in the 1950s and the compelling reunion of missionaries and former students in 2001. By tracing the all-but-forgotten story of the community of Benedictine women who were central to the experience of the mission for many Aboriginal families in the twentieth century, this book lays a foundation for further work. This sensitive account of Spanish Benedictine women at an Aboriginal mission in Western Australia is poignant and disturbing. Notable for its ecumenical spirit, depth of research and deep engagement with the subject, A Bridge Between is a model of how religious history, in its broader bearings, can be written. — Graeme Davison, Monash University With great insight and care, A Bridge Between presents a sympathetic but not uncritical history of the lives of individuals who have often been invisible. The story of the nuns at New Norcia is a timely contribution to Australia’s religious history. Given the findings of the Royal Commission, it will be widely read both within and beyond the academy. History is, here, a spiritual discipline, and an exercise in hope and reconciliation. — Laura Rademaker, The Australian National University

Creating White Australia

Author: Jane Carey
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743321333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
The adoption of White Australia as government policy in 1901 demonstrates that whiteness was crucial to the ways in which the new nation of Australia was constituted. And yet, historians have largely overlooked whiteness in their studies of Australia's racial past. Creating White Australia takes a fresh approach to the question of ‘race’ in Australian history. It demonstrates that Australia's racial foundations can only be understood by recognising whiteness too as 'race'. Including contributions from some of the leading as well as emerging scholars in Australian history, it breaks new ground by arguing that ‘whiteness’ was central to the racial ideologies that created the Australian nation. This book pursues the foundations of white Australia across diverse locales. It also situates the development of Australian whiteness within broader imperial and global influences. As the recent apology to the Stolen Generations, the Northern Territory Intervention and controversies over asylum seekers reveal, the legacies of these histories are still very much with us today.

Confiscation or Coexistence

Author: Andrew Connor
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
It is generally accepted that Roman administrators, arriving in Egypt in the aftermath of Augustus’ annexation of the province, confiscated en masse the land and other property belonging to the temples of Egypt—estimated at as much as one-third of the country. It is further accepted that this confiscation doomed the temples by removing their economic support and making them subservient to the Roman state, and that this in turn led to the collapse of Egyptian religion. In Confiscation or Coexistence: Egyptian Temples in the Age of Augustus, author Andrew Connor takes direct issue with both claims. The interpretative consensus developed after the publication of a handful of key documents—P.Tebt. 2.302 especially, alongside BGU 4.1198 and 1200, and P.Berl.Leihg. 1.5. Connor offers a fundamentally revised interpretation of these texts, building from a fresh examination of the papyri themselves. The book frames the interpretation in a wider discussion of Roman interactions with Egyptian religion, including material from inside and outside Egypt, and locates the development of an interpretative consensus in early 20th-century scholarship within the wider context of empire and colonization at the time. In doing so, Connor explores these papyri through their historical, intellectual, and linguistic contexts, alongside a number of other important texts bearing on the relationship between the temples and the Roman state.