Aboriginal History

Aboriginal History Inc. is a publishing organisation based in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Science, The Australian National University, Canberra. It publishes the annual refereed journal Aboriginal History and a monograph series, and administers the Sally White – Diane Barwick Award.

Since 1977 the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples. It has promoted publication of Indigenous oral traditions, biographies, languages, archival and bibliographic guides, previously unpublished manuscript accounts, critiques of current events, and research and reviews in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, sociology, linguistics, demography, law, geography and cultural, political and economic history.

Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 37 »

Edited by: Shino Konishi
Sunday, 1 December, 2013

In this volume, Tracey Banivanua Mar’s analysis of three moments of Indigenous protest in Tahiti, Victoria and New Zealand presents a new transnational history of indigenous political agency in the 1840s.


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Making Change Happen »

Black and White Activists talk to Kevin Cook about Aboriginal, Union and Liberation Politics

Authored by: Kevin Cook, Heather Goodall
Sunday, 1 September, 2013

This book is a unique window into a dynamic time in the politics and history of Australia. The two decades from 1970 to the Bicentennial in 1988 saw the emergence of a new landscape in Australian Indigenous politics.


Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History »

Authored by: Samuel Furphy
Friday, 1 March, 2013

Edward M. Curr (1820–89) was a pastoralist, horse trader, stock inspector, Aboriginal administrator, author and ethnologist.


Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 36 »

Tuesday, 1 January, 2013

In this volume, Bain Attwood details the personalities and the politics surrounding the foundation and early years of the Aboriginal History journal and the intellectual stakes involved in the various disputes that emerged.


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Black Gold »

Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850-1870

Authored by: Fred Cahir
Saturday, 1 September, 2012

Fred Cahir tells the story about the magnitude of Aboriginal involvement on the Victorian goldfields in the middle of the nineteenth century.


Country, Native Title and Ecology »

Edited by: Jessica K Weir
Thursday, 1 March, 2012

Country, native title and ecology all converge in this volume to describe the dynamic intercultural context of land and water management on Indigenous lands.


Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 35 »

Tuesday, 1 November, 2011

In this volume, Grace Karskens extends her cross-cultural research on early colonial New South Wales by focusing on the uses of European clothing by Aboriginal men.


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'I Succeeded Once' »

The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula, 1839–1840

Authored by: Marie Hansen Fels
Sunday, 1 May, 2011

In ‘I Succeeded Once’ – The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula, 1839-1840, Marie Fels makes the work of William Thomas accessible to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and the descendants of the Aboriginal people


Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 34 »

Saturday, 1 January, 2011

In this volume, Mitchell Rolls reconsiders the question of silence in Aboriginal history by examining a wide range of literature on Indigenous themes, which was produced during the period dubbed by W.E.H.


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In Good Faith? »

Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire, 1825-1855

Authored by: Jessie Mitchell
Saturday, 1 January, 2011

In the early decades of the 19th century, Indigenous Australians suffered devastating losses at the hands of British colonists, who largely ignored their sovereignty and even their humanity.


Passionate Histories »

Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia

Wednesday, 1 September, 2010

This book examines the emotional engagements of both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people with Indigenous history.


Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 33 »

Edited by: Peter Read
Thursday, 1 April, 2010

In her recent magisterial history of early Sydney, Grace Karskens mused on a critical distinction in emphasis between settler history and Aboriginal history: ‘in settler history we seem to be searching constantly for beginnings’, she notes, ‘but i


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Racial Folly »

A Twentieth-Century Aboriginal Family

Authored by: Gordon Briscoe
Monday, 1 February, 2010

Briscoe’s grandmother remembered stories about the first white men coming to the Northern Territory.


Aboriginal Placenames »

Naming and re-naming the Australian landscape

Thursday, 1 October, 2009

Aboriginal approaches to the naming of places across Australia differ radically from the official introduced Anglo-Australian system.


The Two Rainbow Serpents Travelling »

Mura track narratives from the ‘Corner Country’

Authored by: Jeremy Beckett, Luise Hercus
Tuesday, 1 September, 2009

The ‘Corner Country’, where Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales now converge, was in Aboriginal tradition crisscrossed by the tracks of the mura, ancestral beings, who named the country as they travelled, linking place to language.


Indigenous Biography and Autobiography »

Monday, 1 December, 2008

In this absorbing collection of papers Aboriginal, Maori, Dalit and western scholars discuss and analyse the difficulties they have faced in writing Indigenous biographies and autobiographies.


Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 32 »

Tuesday, 1 January, 2008

Since 1977, the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples.


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Transgressions »

Critical Australian Indigenous histories

Edited by: Ingereth Macfarlane, Mark Hannah
Saturday, 1 December, 2007

This volume brings together an innovative set of readings of complex interactions between Australian Aboriginal people and colonisers.


Culture in Translation »

The anthropological legacy of R. H. Mathews

Edited by: Martin Thomas
Saturday, 1 September, 2007

R. H. Mathews (1841–1918) was an Australian-born surveyor and self-taught anthropologist. From 1893 until his death in 1918, he made it his mission to record all ‘new and interesting facts’ about Aboriginal Australia.


'The Axe Had Never Sounded' »

Place, people and heritage of Recherche Bay, Tasmania

Authored by: John Mulvaney
Wednesday, 1 August, 2007

‘This book meets well the triple promise of the title – the inter-connections of place, people and heritage. John Mulvaney brings to this work a deep knowledge of the history, ethnography and archaeology of Tasmania.


Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 31 »

Monday, 1 January, 2007

Since 1977, the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples.


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What Good Condition? »

Reflections on an Australian Aboriginal Treaty 1986–2006

Edited by: Peter Read, Gary Meyers, Bob Reece
Friday, 1 December, 2006

What Good Condition? collects edited papers, initially delivered at the Treaty Advancing Reconciliation conference, on the proposal for a treaty between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, a proposal which has been discuss


Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 30 »

Sunday, 1 January, 2006

Since 1977, the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples.


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Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 29 »

Saturday, 1 January, 2005

Since 1977, the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples.


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Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 28 »

Thursday, 1 January, 2004

Since 1977, the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples.


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