Indigenous (Australian) entrepreneurship?

International Journal of Business and Globalisation

Volumn 2, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 419-436

  Foley, Dennis ^a  

^a SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Indigenous Australia; Indigenous entrepreneurship; participatory based research; racism; rightness of whiteness; social change; usurpers

Indexed keywords

EID: 84881868230     PISSN: 17533627     EISSN: 17533635     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2008.018304     Document Type: Article

References (64)

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61. Professor Eve Fesl is Australia’s first Indigenous PhD in linguistics - post colonisation. A Gubbi Gubbi Elder, formerly of Monash, Griffith and QUT Universities, retired to her traditional lands on the Sunshine Coast.
62. The author’s research indicates that there are several stages of Indigenous entrepreneurial activity; the first predates European settler society domination of 1788 by many tens of thousands of years. The second wave involved societal reconstruction during the coastal frontier periods and inland settlement within the 300 mile coastal limit. This is pre and post gold rush periods between the 1820 and 1890s (see Cowlishaw, 2004; Barnes, 2007; Gale, 1989; Dana, 1996; Hinton, 1966). Some Indigenous groups lived parallel with the pastoral industry working in and around the stations yet maintaining to various degrees their own Indigenous economy. Even in urban development especially in Sydney, Indigenous networks, some traditional owners, others who had migrated there for the very same reasons modern day rural youth migrate to the cities (work, education and increased opportunity)lived in inner city areas and in groups on the city fringe. In the late 1880s the inner city suburb of Glebe had a Koori population of around a 1000 people employed in various waterside industries and local factories as did the Waterloo and Redfern areas who supplied labour to the Enfield Rail development. The third distinct wave can be identified in the post-federation period when we have two distinct waves, one the inland frontier the other the coastal frontier where many Indigenous groups lost their ability to work and live on pastoral properties forcing them into mission situations as for many their livelihood was callously stripped away from them as their prosperous farms were given to returning soldiers. The inland groups, especially the remote groups were either totally exploited or in the Wave Hill example they maintained close connection to their traditional lands eking out an existence on neighbouring cattle stations. Basically after federation what societal structure that Aboriginal groups had enjoyed was thrown into chaos following consecutive World Wars, severe droughts and a collapse of commodity prices and the rural economy during the Great Depression. Some urban groups however maintained a survival existence working in mundane industries such as stevedoring and or labour in the railway industry or semi-sustenance - fishing and gathering similar to the Larparouse and Narrabeen communities. The fourth wave was in the 1960s and early 1970s and the fifth economic wave in the Whitlam-Fraser period. The sixth wave of the Hawke-Keating era of the 1980s to 1996 gave promise of self-determination and self management, this never really developed and was obliterated in the seventh wave on the rise to power of the Howard coalition Foley government in 1996 and their ‘practical reconciliation’ of ‘mainstreaming’ services and watering down of Indigenous land rights with the Ten-point Plan and other legislation that determines what is best for Indigenous Australians. Yet we still die younger, experience preventable diseases in plague proportion, experience high unemployment, extreme incarceration rates, health statistics and poverty worse than some third world countries, and the rapid loss of our culture. And yet our former Prime Minister speaks for all Australians when he knows what is best for us … I do not think so! In seven stages of economic progression it has been one of genocide, frustration, economic and social stagnation, best described by one elder as one step forward and two steps back.
63. The concept that is ‘the dreaming’ has many infantile aspects which are derogative to many Australian Aboriginal people; the Anglo metaphorical concept known as ‘the dreaming’ that Hindle and Lansdowne (2005, p.140) fail to acknowledge is a Eurocentric phrase that has been credited to the pen of the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer in 1894 at Alice Springs following a conversation with Frank Gillen when he was trying to describe ulchrringa which concerned the Arunta peoples (Wolfe, 1991, pp. 198–200). Or if you are well versed in this area perhaps this misused phrase was initiated by Marcus Clarke who wrote in his treatise in 1876 (18 years before Spencer) of “ … the Land of the Dawning … the phantasmagoria of that wild dream-land” (Salusinszky, 1997, pp.33, 34). Any reference to “the dreaming … the dreamtime” or any other version of contemporary discourse that has been ‘applied’ to Indigenous Australia by Hindle and Lansdowne could indicate sloppy referencing and/or shallowness of knowledge on this topic. In their defence however it has become a popular phrase within the tourism industry.
64. A specific reference will not be given due to the sensitivity and severity of the comment. The matter was raised however independently on two occasions; firstly by Indigenous colleagues at an Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) conference and secondly by non-indigenous scholars from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) whilst undertaking a post-doctoral appointment at The Australian National University, Canberra.