Bøker av Bain Attwood

Focusing on William Cooper's most important campaigns, this carefully researched study sheds important new light on the long struggle that Indigenous people have fought to have the truth about Australia's black history heard and win representation in Australia's political order.

''We cannot help but wonder why it has taken the white Australians just on 200 years to recognise us as a race of people'' Bill Onus, 1967Aboriginal people were the original landowners in Australia, yet this was easily forgotten by Europeans settling this old continent. Labelled as a primitive and dying race, by the end of the nineteenth century most Aborigines were denied the right to vote, to determine where their families would live and to maintain their cultural traditions.In this groundbreaking work, Bain Attwood charts a century-long struggle for rights for Aborigines in Australia. He tracks the ever-shifting perceptions of race and history and how these impacted on the ideals and goals of campaigners for rights for indigenous people. He looks at prominent Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners and what motivated their involvement in key incidents and movements. Drawing on oral and documentary sources, he investigates how they found enough common ground to fight together for justice and equality for Aboriginal people.Rights for Aborigines illuminates questions of race, history, political and social rights that are central to our understanding of relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

Before 1788, the peoples of this continent did not consider themselves ''Aboriginal''. They only became ''Aborigines'' in the wake of the British invasion. In this startling and original study, Bain Attwood reveals how relationships between black Australians and European colonisers determined the hearts and minds of the indigenous peoples, making them anew as Aboriginals.In examining the period after the ''killing times'', this young historian provides new perspectives on racial ideology, government policy, and the rule of law. In examining European domination, he unravels the patterns of associations which were woven between European and Aborigine, and shows the complex meanings and significance these relationships held for both groups.In this book, the dispossessed are not cast as merely passive victims; they appear as real characters, men and women who adapted to European colonisation in accordance with their own historical and cultural experience. Out of this exchange the colonised created a new consciousness and began to forge a common identity for themselves.A story of cultural change and continuity both poignant and disturbing in its telling, this important book is sure to provoke controversy about what it means to be Aboriginal.''This intelligent and impeccably researched book seeks to advance our understanding of the story of white/Aboriginal contact. It will be required reading for anyone working in the field.'' - Henry Reynolds''Colonisation is both destructive and creative of peoples. Recent historians have revealed the extensive destruction of black Australians and their cultures. But now Bain Attwood, in this finely crafted and highly original series of case studies. plots the complex human relations and historical forces that re-made these indigenous people into the Aborigines.'' - Richard Broome

The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights is the first book of its kind. Not only does it tell the history of the political struggle for Aboriginal rights in all parts of Australia; it does so almost entirely through a selection of historical documents created by the Aboriginal campaigners themselves, many of which have never been published. It presents Aboriginal perspectives of their dispossession and their long and continuing fight to overcome this. In charting the story of Aboriginal political activity from its beginnings on Flinders Island in the 1830s to the fight over native title today, this book aims to help Australians better understand both the continuities and the changes in Aboriginal politics over the last 150 years: in the leadership of the Aboriginal political struggle, the objectives of these campaigners for rights for Aborigines, their aspirations, the sources of their programmes for change, their methods of protest, and the outcomes of their protest. Through the words of Aboriginal activists, across 150 years, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights charts the relationship between political involvement and Aboriginal identity.

A collaborative autobiography and an oral narrative as well as a history. The subject is the experience of the Anglo-Australian Burrage family on Aboriginal reserves between 1917 and 1940.

Most non-Indigenous Australians know of Charles Perkins. Many are familiar with a few other Aboriginal leaders. Yet few have heard of William Cooper, one of the most important Aboriginal leaders in Australia''s history. "Thinking Black" tells the story of Cooper and the Australian Aborigines'' League, and their campaign for Aboriginal people''s rights. Through petitions to government, letters to other campaigners and organisations, and entreaties to friends and well-wishers, the book reveals their passionate struggle against dispossession and displacement, the denial of rights, and their fight to be citizens in their own country. Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus document the circumstances behind the most significant moments in Cooper''s political career -- his famous 1933 petition to King George V, his call for a ''Day of Mourning'' in 1938, the walk-off from Cummeragunja in 1939 and his opposition to an Aboriginal regiment in 1939. It explores the principles Cooper drew on in his campaigning, not least his ''Letter from an Educated Black'', surely one of the most intriguing political testaments by an Australian leader. "Thinking Black" sheds new light on the history of what it has meant to be Aboriginal in modern Australia. It reveals the rich and varied cultural traditions, both Aboriginal and British, religious and secular, that have informed Aboriginal people''s battle for justice, and their vision of equality in Australia of two peoples: equal yet distinct.