ANTH-229 Peoples and Cultures of Australia

Professor Collman

For the last two hundred years, indigenous and settler Australians have struggled over basic issues in the control and exploitation of the Australian land. This course will explore these struggles from various perspectives. The course will open by studying through film and ethnography the Australian government’s sponsoring of white settlement in remote sections of the Outback, a story told in Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career. By studying Aboriginal art and relationship to the land, the course will examine how the Aborigines interpreted and managed these events, including their development of a land rights movement during the late twentieth century. The course will end with a review of the government’s activist management of Aborigines including the controversy about state-sponsored removal of part-Aborigines from their Aboriginal families, the emergence of Aboriginal fringe-camps on the outskirts of country towns and contemporary social issues such as alcohol consumption and domestic violence.

Key Texts

Bringing them home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Children from Their Families,

Jeff Collmann, Fringe-dwellers and welfare: the Aboriginal response to bureaucracy, selections

Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain

Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge
Fred Myers, Pintubi Country, Pintubi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines

Justice Woodward, Aboriginal Land Rights Commission, Second Report, selections

Films

“My Brilliant Career”
“Rabbit Proof Fence”
“Mabo: Life of an Island Man”
“Where the Green Ants Dream”

Graded assignments will take three forms, including:

1) Critical book review: students will write a detailed critical review of Conway’s The Road from Coorain
2) Midterm examination: Students will receive a short list of comparative questions in advance from which to select one for an open book midterm examination;
3) Debate: the class will conduct debates on two problems in contemporary Aboriginal affairs including Aboriginal land rights and compensation for the "Stolen Generation".

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: None

Other academic years
There is information about this course number in other academic years:

• 2004-2005 Fall and Spring
• 2006-2007 Fall and Spring
• 2008-2009 Fall and Spring
• 2009-2010 Fall and Spring
• 2011-2012 Fall and Spring
• 2013-2014 Fall and Spring

More information
Look for this course in the schedule of classes.

The academic department web site for this program may provide other details about this course.