Explore the vast range of titles available.

This year we celebrate not only the twentieth anniversary of the Culture and Communication Studies section but also the twentieth anniversary of Ghassan Hage's 'White nation' - his ethnographic account of what he calls the white national subject.i My paper is an attempt to build on Ghassan's work by considering research published since his book. I will argue that in the public culture of Australia, Indigenous people and Indigenous things are now prolifically affirmed. Before I explore this Indigenous-affirmative culture, let me explicitly exclude two topics: the extent and nature of racism against Indigenous Australians; and Indigenous Australians' experiences of contemporary Australian society.

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.

By examining the thinking of a major public health bureaucrat, Dr Cecil Cook, this article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between racial thought and liberalism in Australia’s administration of ‘Aboriginal affairs’. In Cook’s appraisal of the health problems of northern Australia, 2 kinds of distinction were significant: racial (whites, ‘Asiatics’, Aborigines) and capacity for hygienic living. We argue that over the span of Cook’s career as an administrator and commentator (1925–69) distinctions of capacity were more fundamental, for he assumed that both whites and ‘Aboriginals’ could be brought to standards of conduct required of a healthy population. We review Cook’s ideas about what made the Northern Territory different from the 6 states and about the potential of miscegenation and ‘absorption’. We argue that Cook’s nationalism was not simply ‘ethnic’ but also significantly ‘civic’ and that he was fundamentally a liberal assimilationist, albeit cautious and at times coercive in his application of public health ideas to the program of civic equality. In the course of our argument, we comment on other historians’ conceptions of Cook.

Tim Rowse's book, 'Indigenous and Other Australians Since 1901' (2017), raises timely questions about the writing of Aboriginal history, as well as offering insights into contemporary political debates. In this conversation, conducted via email, we examine some of the book's arguments, the evidence drawn on to make them and why these interventions are necessary today. In the introduction to the book, Rowse draws attention to W.E.H. Stanner's hope for telling the 'the story ... of the unacknowledged relations between two racial groups within a single field of life'. He shows why this was and continues to be so difficult in terms of identity, territorial control and jurisdictional practice. In Australia, indigeneity does not mean one thing, and its meaning has changed and become increasingly plural over time; for much of the twentieth century there were really two Australias - north and south - that were represented and governed differently; and two sovereignties - one kin-based, the other state-based - that have posed considerable challenges to each other, right up to the present. This argument serves as the jumping-off point for the conversation.

As Australia became a nation in 1901, no-one anticipated that 'Aboriginal affairs' would become an on-going national preoccupation.

The statistical table is one expression of the settler colonial capacity and willingness to enumerate colonized “peoples” as “populations.” By examining four tables—from 1763, 1828, 1848, and 1850—in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia this paper illustrates the emergence of this powerful technique of representation during the same a period in which European states were developing their capacity to represent the social in statistical terms. In the colonial context, the rise of the notion of a “population” whose characteristics could be averaged contributed to the specifically administrative eclipse of native sovereignty, paralleling the jural/political demise of native sovereignty.

Accounts of liberalism as an ideology of European imperialism have argued that when liberals discovered that colonized people were, in various ways, intractable, they questioned and then abandoned the postulated universal human capacity for improvement; the racial and cultural determinants of native “backwardness” seemed stronger than any universal susceptibility to the civilizing projects of liberal imperialism. While the intellectual trajectory of some canonical liberals illustrates this decline in liberal universalism, some colonized intellectuals—while acknowledging distinctions of race and people-hood—adhered to the universalist optimism of liberalism. In pursuit of a global history of liberalism, this essay examines writings by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper to illustrate a robust indigenous universalism. Drawing on the intellectual heritage of Christianity and universal (or “stadial”) philosophy of history, these intellectuals affirmed emphatically that their people were demonstrating the capacities to be subjects of liberal civilization.

Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future of Indigenous self-governance in four settler-colonial nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Bringing together emerging scholars and leaders in the field of indigenous law and legal history, this collection offers a long-term view of the legal, political and administrative relationships between Indigenous collectivities and nation-states. Placing historical contingency and complexity at the center of analysis, the papers collected here examine in detail the process by which settler states both dissolved indigenous jurisdictions and left spaces - often unwittingly - for indigenous survival and corporate recovery. They emphasise the promise and the limits of modern opportunities for indigenous self-governance; whilst showing how all the players in modern settler colonialism build on a shared and multifaceted past. Indigenous tradition is not the only source of the principles and practices of indigenous self-determination; the essays in this book explore some ways that the legal, philosophical and economic structures of settler colonial liberalism have shaped opportunities for indigenous autonomy. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance will interest all those concerned with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations.