Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world.

Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that underpin different communities and to assert and affirm these values.

A practically grounded accessible examination of heritage as a cultural practice, The Uses of Heritage is global in its benefit to students and field professionals alike.

Uses of heritage

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George E. Marcus; Michael M. J. Fischer

For a while now I have been researching and writing about Australian Indigenous education issues. Like you all, I have seen much good work and learnt much from what is going on across the country and internationally to improve outcomes for Indigenous learners in formal education processes. And still we go on with the struggle and with the limitations that Western sciences and practices place on us in the process. This paper draws together theoretical propositions from the work we have been progressing for the higher education sector over the past decade and to point to some foundational principles that can help establish some early beginnings with Indigenous education as a discipline in the higher education sector.

The Cultural Interface.

Chapter 1 Colonial Culture of Archaeology Chapter 2 Progressivism: The Invention of Prehistory Chapter 3 Antiquation: Aboriginal Peoples as Living Fossils Chapter 4 Migrationism: The Archaeology of Dispossession Chapter 5 Diffusionism: The Archaeology of Alienation Chapter 6 Subjectation: Appropration Through Science Chapter 7 Shared Nations: The New Appropriation Chapter 8 Partnerships: Pathways to a Decolonised Practice Chapter 9 References Chapter 10 Index

Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology

This article explores the role of archives in the construction of Australian Indigeneity, past, present and future, with reference to the colonial and post-colonial culture of the archive in Australia, the possibilities for refiguring the archive present in post-colonial thinking, Indigenous ways of knowing, and digital technologies, and the role of reconciling research in that process. It presents the main findings of an Australian Research Council–funded project, Trust and Technology: Building Archival Systems for Indigenous Oral Memory, and draws on Ph.D. research undertaken by Shannon Faulkhead relating to the role that written and oral records play as sources of the narratives of the Koorie people of Victoria in south-east Australia. In conclusion, the article proposes new legal, policy and professional approaches that support Indigenous frameworks of knowledge, memory and evidence. It also discusses the implications of the findings of the Trust and Technology project for archival theory, practice and education.

Distrust in the archive: reconciling records

Indigenous Knowledge and Archives: Accessing Hidden History and Understandings

FROM BOTH Lynette Russell’s memoir and her scholarly study we can draw the same sad conclusion: the gulf of understanding between indigenous and non-indigenous society has led to a damaging, though not deadly, fracture of the Aboriginal community and culture. This conclusion is hardly revelatory but, in partnership, these books do shed light on the subtler effects of systemically racist public policy on private worlds. Savage Imaginings explores the discourses that have shaped public perceptions of ‘the Aborigine’, while A Little Bird Told Me journeys into a concealed family history to uncover the cross-generational secrets and hurt that stemmed from such perceptions. In Savage Imaginings, Russell studies official, academic and popular depictions of Australian indigenous culture, as they appear globally in texts, catalogues and museum displays. She argues that these depictions work to construct a category of ‘Aborigine’ that denies individual identities. Texts such as Walkabout magazine portrayed indigenous culture as homogenous, static and primitive. Russell is interested in uncovering the specific reasons for such portrayals. For example, she argues that, as a publication of the Australian National Travel Association, Walkabout used Aborigines alternately as anthropological subjects and as symbols of the nation’s progress. The lone, anonymous figure standing on an escarpment with one leg half raised represented the precontact age, and showed the world just how far the distant young colony had come. My most treasured possession is a 1975 volume of the Briggs family genealogy. It is a record from a university psychology department that documents my Aboriginal family, following the line from Tasmanian Aborigines to my father. Having been born in 1978, my claim to this heritage is staked by two words, ‘Baby Katy’, scrawled on a scrap of paper that sits next to my father’s name. Despite knowing better, I have always treasured that as ‘evidence’ of my Aboriginal heritage. I am torn by this on two counts: firstly, I subconsciously endorse the position that Aboriginality is genetically determined; secondly, as a means of establishing my sense of place, it highlights the privileging of an external European discourse over my own family’s internal dialogue. Russell’s books address both these issues. The ‘genetic fallacy’ is the historically popular belief that a line of descent was paramount in determining ‘Aboriginality’. The establishment of a genetic link became the crux of identity crises for many Aboriginals. How black is black? While Russell claims that the genetic fallacy has been generally rejected by academia in favour of cultural and socialisation theories, it is a method that still carries weight in sectors of the ‘white’ and even indigenous populace.

Savage imaginings: Historical and contemporary constructions of Australian Aboriginalities

Acknowledgments 1. The space in between: and introduction - Lynette Russell 2. The Northern Cape frontier zone in South African frontier historiography - Nigel Penn 3. Time after time: Temporal frontiers and boundaries in colonial images of the Australian landscape - Rod Macnell 4. Antipodean heathens: The London Missionary society in Polynesia and Australia, 1800-1850 - Anna Johnston 5. Martyrs and messengers: Benjamin Franklin and the American frontier, the Moravians, and the nature of reason - Ron Southern 6. The fluid frontier: Central Queensland 1845 -1863 - Luke Godwin 7. 'The final legal frontier': The Treaty of Waitangi and the creation of legal boundaries between Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand society - Grant Morris 8. Handkerchief diplomacy: E.J. Eyre and sexual politics on the South Australian frontier - Kay Schaffer 9. Beyond the frontier: possibilities and precariousness along Australia's southern coast - Juile Evans 10. Torres Strait Islanders and the maritime frontier in early colonial Australia - Ian J. McNiven 11. Nomadic landscapes and the colonial frontier: The problem of nomadism in German South West Africa - John K. Noyes 12. All's not quiet on the Western Front - rethinking resistance and frontiers in Aboriginal historiography - Nathan Wolsk index

Lynette Russell

Papers

Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology

Distrust in the archive: reconciling records

Indigenous Knowledge and Archives: Accessing Hidden History and Understandings

Savage imaginings: Historical and contemporary constructions of Australian Aboriginalities

Colonial frontiers : indigenous-European encounters in settler societies