'Years ago some lived here': Aboriginal Australians and the production of popular culture, history and identity in 1930s Victoria

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 128, 2006, Pages 18-34

  Healy, Sianan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347300034     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610608601217     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Mr Parker to Mrs Brunt, 18 July 1933, Visits and Displays, B313/246, NAA
2. For discussions of primitivist discourse occurring at more elite levels of Australian society, among artists, writers and intellectuals, see Laurie Duggan, Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australia's Visual Arts, 1901-1939 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2001)
3. Tom Griffiths, Huntersand Collectors: the Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
4. John Williams, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism, 1913-1939 (Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
5. Grace Cochrane, The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1992)
6. Griffiths
7. Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)
8. Gavin Souter, 'Skeletons at the Feast', in Australians 1938, eds Bill Gammage and Peter Spearritt (Sydney. Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1987), 13-28
9. Julian Thomas, '1930: Past and Present in a Elaborate Anniversary', Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 91, special issue: Making the Bicentenary (October 1988): 55-89
10. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 8
11. William O. Beeman defines spectacle as 'a public display of a society's meaningful elements⋯. The meaningfulness of a spectacle is usually proportionate to the degree to which the elements displayed to the public seem to represent key elements in the public's cultural and emotional life'. William O. Beeman, 'The Anthropology of Theater and Spectacle', Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 369-93
12. See also J. MacAloon, 'Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies', in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. J. MacAloon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 243
13. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance, 1788-1994 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994)
14. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005)
15. John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
16. J. M. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979)
17. Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997)
18. Broome, Aboriginal Victorians; and McGregor
19. Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980)
20. L. V. Mudge, Secretary, Mildura Harriers' Club, to BPA, 22 January 1927, Visits and Displays, B313/246, NAA
21. Renato Rosaldo, 'Imperialist Nostalgia', Representations, no. 26, special issue: Memory and Counter - Memory (Spring 1989): 107-22
22. Argus, 22 February 1935, 8
23. Frazer Andrewes, "A Culture of Speed: The Dilemma of Being Modern in 1930s Australia' (PhD thesis. University of Melbourne, 2003)
24. Ibid
25. No author. Book of the Stampede (Victorian Centenary Celebrations, 1934), 23
26. F. M. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979), 200
27. Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: the Australian Popular Stage 1788-1914 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990), 100
28. see Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890-1960 (Brisbane: Queensland University Press, 1984)
29. Captain C. A. S. Mansbridge, 'Friendly Wild Men of Caledon Bay: Melbourne Husband and Wife Take a Caravan Tour to Happy Northern Land', Argus Weekend Magazine, 28 January 1939, no page. Press Cuttings, B2292, NAA
30. Lake Tyers Permits and Conduct, 1931-39, B356/103, NAA
31. 'Abo Band Takes a Leaf From Nature in Making Music', 1934, Press Cuttings, B2292, NAA
32. Harold Newman, a local of Lakes Entrance, a town near Lake Tyers, remembers being taught by the Lake Tyers residents to play gum leaf music, and that they often played a selection of 'popular and minstrel tunes'. Historian Kevin Bradley notes that in the 1930s, 'because performance of traditional music was actively discouraged at many missions, hymn singing became the dominant form of social singing, often accompanied by gum leaf playing. ⋯ On many missions and stations where traditional culture was maintained, often secretly, the old and the new ways were kept separate. Interestingly, the gum leaf seems to have been linked with the music of the whites rather than traditional music, and was performed publicly'. Kevin Bradley, 'Gum Leaf Music in Australia', Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2 (1995): 2-14
33. Phillip Pepper, You Are What You Make Yourself to Be: The Story of a Victorian Aboriginal Family, 1842-1980 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1989), 80
34. Lake Tyers-Manager's Reports, 1930-44, B356/54, NAA
35. Denis Byrne, 'Deep Nation: Australia's Acquisition of an Indigenous Past', Aboriginal History 20 (1996), 86
36. Broome, Aboriginal Australians