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This article examines the sectarianism that divided feminist organisations in early twentieth-century NSW. In 1903, the Catholic feminist Annie Golding took legal action against the Protestant paper, The Watchman, accusing it of libel. Through an examination of the five leading women embroiled in the Golding affair, this article shows that women activists saw women's political loyalties as potentially divided, not only by questions of labour or free trade but also by religion. Although the feminist organisations the Women's Suffrage League (WSL) and Women's Progressive Association (WPA) each claimed non-sectarian status, in the debates surrounding the Golding case, their leadership proved willing to appeal to sectarian prejudices. When religious presses claimed to find sectarian division among women's organisations, leading feminist women themselves also quickly attributed their differences to religion and exploited what they considered women's natural piety for political gain. These findings contribute to a growing scholarship on the religious dimensions of women's public activism, revealing complex interactions between religion, politics, class and gender.

When Yulgi Nunggumadjbarr, a Nunggubuyu woman, described the Angurugu mission where she grew up, her memories were fond.

Histories of the colonisation of Australia have recognised distinct periods or eras in the colonial relationship: 'protection' and 'assimilation'. It is widely understood that, in 1973, the Whitlam Government initiated a new policy era: 'self-determination'. Yet, the defining features of this era, as well as how, why and when it ended, are far from clear. In this collection we ask: how shall we write the history of self-determination? How should we bring together, in the one narrative, innovations in public policy and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander initiatives? How (dis)continuous has 'self-determination' been with 'assimilation' or with what came after? Among the contributions to this book there are different views about whether Australia is still practising 'self-determination' and even whether it ever did or could. This book covers domains of government policy and Indigenous agency including local government, education, land rights, the outstation movement, international law, foreign policy, capital programs, health, public administration, mission policies and the policing of identity. Each of the contributors is a specialist in his/her topic. Few of the contributors would call themselves 'historians', but each has met the challenge to consider Australia's recent past as an era animated by ideas and practices of Indigenous self-determination.

Rock art created in the recent past has often been interpreted as a passive reflection of Indigenous curiosity at newly introduced phenomena. However, more recent analyses have tried to refigure such depictions as active and innovative artworks with social and cultural roles to play. Likewise, most contact rock art studies identify and interpret contact rock art within the clan or group context - as representations of a whole. In this paper, we broaden the conceptual framework around contact rock art to, where possible, embrace analyses of particular artists, their life biographies and legacies. By focusing on one known artist and his painting of a horse in western Arnhem Land, we draw together rock art studies, ethnography and Aboriginal life biographies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of Australian history.

According to Mathew's biographer, Malcolm Prentis, this \"innovative use of Aboriginal myth\" was his \"unique\" contribution.2 Mathew was also a Presbyterian minister. Later in life, he became Moderator General of the Presbyterian Church of Australia—the highest office of one of the big four Christian denominations in Australia—and was closely connected to Aboriginal missions across the continent as well as through the Pacific. Christian missions around the empire were hubs for the production of ethnographic knowledge of Indigenous people.7 Neil Gunson described \"cells of ethnographic scholars\" in the imperial metropole who became linked among themselves with missionary correspondents located in the Pacific and Australia.8 As Helen Garner and Robert Kenny pointed out, colonial ethnographers (including missionaries) and Indigenous authorities are vital in the history of British anthropology.9 The role of Indigenous people fomenting colonists' crises of faith, including around the historicity of biblical stories, is also well established (think of William Colenso, the \"Bishop the natives converted,\" who questioned the historicity of Noah's flood after his discussions with Zulu man William Ngidi).10 Colonial discourses, including around religion, emerged out of dialogic exchanges between colonisers and Indigenous people.11 European theories of religion were also critical for the creation of European imperial knowledges. Understanding and acknowledging western religious history as well as the religious histories of non-western peoples is vital to appreciating the complexity of the imperial age.12 Like the study of race, the study of \"religions\" emerged simultaneously with European colonialism; discourse around \"religion\" was bound up in a project of producing knowledge for classifying, ordering, dominating and ruling colonised peoples.13 Questions about the origins of religion were particularly pressing in late nineteenth‒ and early twentieth‒century anthropology and ethnography.14 In his study of Frazer, Durkheim and Freud, Robert Alum Jones argued that anthropological debates around totemism (particularly as supposedly practiced by Australian Aboriginal people) were directed at uncovering the universal origins of religion.

Though dissatisfaction is strong, I am hesitant to dismiss Aboriginal understandings of the past as only 'nostalgia', especially where these understandings can serve as a corrective to stories of the missions that privilege non-Indigenous agency, that is, stories which cast Aboriginal people as only either victims or beneficiaries of the actions of missionaries.8 This article seeks to understand these positive memories of missions by examining a set of texts produced by that generation itself during the mission years: their letters of petition to the mission authorities. Looking at petitions deriving from three different Christian missions of different denominations in the early 1960s, I argue that this string of petitions indicate that some Aboriginal people felt ownership over these missions and had high expectations for the material, spiritual and social benefits missionaries could bring their communities. Howard Morphy and Frances Morphy argued that Ngalakan people remembered the 1920s to the 1950s on the cattle stations as a 'golden age' to distinguish themselves from the supposedly 'wild blacks' of an earlier period and to criticise the present.17 On the other hand, historians Ann McGrath and Minoru Hokari found that Aboriginal people's experience of stockwork as meaningful work explained, in part, how Aboriginal descriptions of a 'golden age' on cattle stations operate simultaneously with memories of mistreatment.18 As part of a project of 'cross-culturalising' history, Hokari rejected what he described as 'the academic politeness of \"we respect your story as 'memory' or 'myth',\"' arguing that historians must recognise Aboriginal historical knowledge to avoid reproducing a power relationship that silences Aboriginal voices.19 Tim Rowse, however, expressed concern that such interpretations might minimise the colonising impact of paternalistic policies.20 With regards to the missions, there has been similar debate as to how to explain the positive accounts from an older generation of Aboriginal people. Morphy argued that, as for the cattle stations, the violent period which preceded and the social disruption which followed the Yolngu missions of the mid-twentieth century 'biased oral accounts in the missionaries' favour'.21 Gwenda Baker also found that the mission time is now 'seen in a better light' due to dissatisfaction with current government policies.22 Gillian Cowlishaw concentrated on intergenerational difference in Aboriginal memories of midtwentieth-century western New South Wales.

Review(s) of: Dharmalan Dana: An Australian Aboriginal man's 73-Year search for the story of his Aboriginal and Indian ancestors, by George Nelson and Robynne Nelson, 364 pp, ANU Press, Canberra, 2014, ISBN 9781925021493 (pbk), $45.00.