Country, Kin and Culture: Survival of an Australian Aboriginal Community
Smith, an archaeologist, has turned to history to successfully recast the subjects of her enquiry ─a complex of Aboriginal groups, whose ancestral lands span the southern Arnhem Land plateau. She foregrounds the lived circumstances of the generations she came to know, rather than the idealised lives of their ancestors.
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Country, Kin and Culture:
Survival of an Australian Aboriginal Community
Claire Smith | 2020 (first published 2004)
Claire Smith has undertaken archaeological fieldwork and research in the Barunga region, south-east of Katherine in the Northern Territory, since 1990. For many archaeologists, concerned primarily with deep history and patterns of Aboriginal culture unfolding well before European arrival, the disruptions and dislocations of the colonial period offer no more than a book-end to their substantive research. Here though, Smith has laid aside the trowel and taken up the historian’s pen, to tell the post-contact story of the Aboriginal groups whose ancient heritage has been her preoccupation over the past three decades. During that time Smith and her own family have formed strong bonds with some of the key Indigenous families of the Barunga, Beswick and Manyalluk communities. Smith doesn’t state it directly, but it is those bonds, and her sense of reciprocity towards the communities hosting and enabling her archaeological research, that has prompted this careful, well-rounded history, in which archaeology hardly figures.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the communities and language groups lying just to the south of Arnhem Land were well studied by anthropologists and linguists, such as Ken Maddock, Deborah Bird Rose, Alan Rumsey and Francesca Merlan. Such research, which has focused upon elderly men and women of high degree who retained detailed knowledge of ceremonial life and material culture, their languages and kinship relations, has had the effect here, as elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, of fixing a 'classical' standard for Aboriginal culture that is often at odds with contemporary expressions of dynamism and innovation. The cumulative weight of decades of colonialism, discriminatory policies and the corrosive effects of alcohol, poor diet and disease, ensures that this mark will not be met again. Historians must confront that issue. Perhaps, coming as she does from another discipline, Smith has not had to shake herself free of those traditional academic allegiances.
Her focus is directed towards a complex of Aboriginal groups, comprising the Jawoyn of the Katherine region and their eastern neighbours, including the Myilly, Rembararrnga, Ngarrbun Ngandi, Ngalakan, Mangarrai and Mara, whose ancestral lands spanned the southern Arnhem Land plateau. European explorers first entered their lives as early as the 1840s (Leichardt) and contact intensified during the building of the Overland Telegraph Line during the early 1870s, but it was not until the arrival of pastoralism during the 1880s that the destructive cascade of violence, the alienation of water and resources, followed by government control and increasing regulation, began to tell on these diverse cultures. Smith recounts those events dispassionately enough, but does so through the documented experiences of the families she has come to know, set against the broader context of Northern Territory history and key shifts in Australian government policy – from segregation and protectionism to assimilation and the utopian, unrealisable ideal of ‘self determination’.
As Smith notes, ‘self-determination’ is more often a euphemism for ‘self-management’, by which European institutions have been scaled-down to fit Aboriginal communities, rather than empowering the vital structures of Aboriginal authority and kinship which have endured in these communities, against the odds. As her historical analysis shows, at each sorry stage of their dispossession and exploitation, the Aboriginal men and women of the Barunga-Wugularr region, have revealed a capacity to adapt inventively to their situation, whether this involved adapting to horticulture, providing the backbone of the Maranboy mining venture, absorbing the shocks of the government’s removal of half-caste children, or the opportunities presented by the outstation movement. Her chapter on the stolen generations, told from the perspective of a small group of survivors, separated as children from their families but always intent on returning to them, is most affecting. Smith does not use the term, but she is describing what might be called a ‘hybrid community’, whose identity has been forged precisely through the ordeals they have been forced to endure for the past 150 years.
Country, Kin and Culture first appeared in 2004. This is a revised edition, and although it still draws its material mainly from the early 1990s, the chapter on the stolen generations is a recent addition. It is a well-written book, in an easy and accessible style, and it’s a pity therefore to note a smattering of proofing errors that Wakefield Press would not have allowed in earlier years. There may be a few too many tables, rather redolent of government reports, but the photographs and maps are all apposite and there’s a good index and full bibliography. I wondered though, why it was that Smith did not include any reflexive discussion of the archaeological work she has undertaken in the region and its reception by the community members who must surely have reflected on its significance in their long historical journey.
Reviewer: Philip Jones, PHA (SA)
Country, Kin and Culture: Survival of an Australian Aboriginal community is published by Wakefield Press.