And tomorrow? ... The dreams of Vertov and Flaherty will be combined into a mechanical "cine-eye-ear" which is such a "participant" camera that it will pass automatically into the hands of those who were, up to now, always in front of it. Then the anthropologist will no longer monopolize the observation of things. Jean Rouch, "The Camera and Man," in Principles of Visual Anthropology, 1975, p. 102 Aboriginal communities are ensuring the continuity of their languages and cultures and representation of their views. By making their own films and videos, they speak for themselves, no longer aliens in an industry which for a century has used them for its own ends.

Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?

Community archaeology seeks to diversify the voices involved in the interpretation of the past. This sub-discipline, one of the fastest growing areas of the field, facilitates mutual education between archaeologists and communities. Wider recognition for the field is, however, hindered by the fact that it lacks a clear methodological structure. In this analysis the various forms in which community archaeology is practised are addressed through six diverse case studies. The underlying principles of these examples are collated through a detailed comparison with the seven-part general methodology proposed by the Community Archaeology Project Quseir, Egypt (CAPQ), with which I have now worked for four years. The Quseir Project offers the most explicit community archaeology methodology published to date.I demonstrate that a shared underlying community approach exists. I then propose an enhanced, wider-reaching methodology for the practice of community archaeology. I conclude that this more explicit met...

Community archaeology: general methods and standards of practice

The Way We Civilise

In 1988 non-Aboriginal Australians will celebrate two hundred years' occupation of a country which had previously been home to an Aboriginal population of about 300,000 people. They probably spoke more than two hundred different languages and most individuals were multilingual (Dixon 1980). They had a rich culture, whose traditions were centrally concerned with the celebration of three basic types of religious ritual-rites of fertility, initiation, and death (Maddock 1982:105-57). In many parts of Australia, particularly in the south where white settlement was earliest and densest, Aboriginal traditional life has largely disappeared, although the memory of it has been passed down the generations. Nowadays all Aborigines, even in the most traditional parts of the north, such as Arnhem Land, are affected to a greater or lesser extent by the Australian version of Western culture, and must preserve their own traditions by a combination of holding strategies. Thus in 1988 many Aboriginal Australians will be inclined to mourn the Bicentenary with its reminder to them of all they have lost.--Page 231-232.

Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions

This thesis investigates the function of humour in the survival of the Aboriginal people against all odds, including the onslaught of invasion, dispossession, powerlessness and oppression since the British invasion in 1788. In my ethnographic journey I am doing something different as an Aboriginal researcher in that insider research is used as my principal methodology. I am able to draw on my own understanding of how humour works in practice as well as in theory. The manifestations of Aboriginal humour in everyday life, together with the reasons why given incidents are funny, are an important part of the contextual cultural information that I bring to this thesis. The oppression of Aboriginal people following European settlement in Australia is marked by government policies which disempowered them, as well the racism which resulted in the clash of cultures and the crisis of identity for Aborigines. In the earlier chapters I draw upon the work of anthropologists, and historians of race relations, to discuss aspects of these issues. The discussion I provide of humour considers how far the emotions and humour are inextricably entwined, and addresses the elements of them. It is found that humour is a universal phenomenon but its manifestations vary from culture to culture. There is a close relationship between social structures and humour. Earlier anthropologists documented humour’s capacity for easing social conflicts, relieving tensions and for promoting order, as they understood it. When a culture is oppressed by another, this is reflected in how humour is expressed. The thesis briefly discusses three ethnic groups in situations of disempowerment whose specific styles of humour have played a role in cultural survival and whose socio-cultural strategies for survival can be compared with those of Aborigines. Culture and humour were closely interconnected in Aboriginal society. It is shown how humour worked in particular settings as a complex institutionalised practice central to Aboriginal culture, and how and why it could be used to regulate social behaviour by joking and shaming tactics. Aboriginal humour had to change, expand or re-form to meet new challenges. Humour was a weapon of the weak and it supported a subculture which grew out of the powerless situation in which Aborigines were placed by the dominant white group. Irony, satire and parody have been strategies of resistance in a colonised and a postcolonising Australia. Aborigines moved out of a culture of silence. Through using the benefits of education, there was progression towards empowerment. In the final three chapters, Black literature, Aboriginal theatre and black visual art and film are discussed and analysed; these were used to make statements of protest, and there developed a new self-awareness where Aboriginal humour pervaded the creative work in these areas. This demonstrates Aboriginal resilience in the face of dire circumstances which threatened their very survival. In the conclusion, connections are identified between traditional and more contemporary modes of Aboriginal humour. Despite destructive European impact, it has persisted as a tool of survival, resistance, and the maintenance of identity.

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The role of Aboriginal humour in cultural survival and resistance

Lousy little sixpence

My Survival As An Aboriginal

Raising The Curtain

In 1953, the Australian film censor and the New South Wales Chief Secretary’s Office simultaneously banned a locally produced dramatised documentary Children of the Wasteland from exhibition and ex...

Ghastly Results: The Banning of Children of The Wasteland (1953) and The Stellar Rise and Demise of Its Maker The Boy Bishop

The rapid spread of cinema throughout the British colonies in the 1920s was regarded as a major threat to the stability of the empire. Following the lead of the British Colonial Office, the Austral...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01439685.2018.1457246

Alec Morgan

Papers

Lousy little sixpence

My Survival As An Aboriginal

Raising The Curtain

Ghastly Results: The Banning of Children of The Wasteland (1953) and The Stellar Rise and Demise of Its Maker The Boy Bishop

Empire of illusions: film censorship, eugenics and Aboriginal spectatorship in Australia's Northern Territory 1928-1950