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Purpose: From 2018, the Schools Up North (SUN) programme worked with three remote Australian schools to enhance their capability and resilience to support the wellbeing and mental health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and staff. This paper explores the implementation of SUN during the first two years of COVID-19 (2020–2021). Method: Using grounded theory methods, school staff, other service providers and SUN facilitators were interviewed, with transcripts and programme documents coded and interrelationships between codes identified. An implementation model was developed. Results: The SUN approach was place-based, locally informed and relational, fostering school resilience through staff reflection on and response to emerging contextual challenges. Challenges were the: community lockdowns and school closures; (un)availability of other services; community uncertainty and anxiety; school staff capability and wellbeing; and risk of educational slippage. SUN strategies were: enhancing teachers' capabilities and resources, facilitating public health discussions, and advocating at regional level. Outcomes were: enhanced capability of school staff; greater school-community engagement; student belonging and engagement; a voice for advocacy; and continuity of SUN's momentum. Conclusions: The resilience approach (rather than specific strategies) was critical for building schools' capabilities for promoting students and staff wellbeing and provides an exemplar for remote schools globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the hashtag #AboriginalLivesMatter on Instagram which was widely used in Australia as part of a global Black Lives Matter (BLM) response in 2020. We map the participants and themes of #AboriginalLivesMatter through the quantitative coding and qualitative thematic analysis of 603 Instagram posts published with this hashtag in June 2020. We find that this conversation is largely driven by celebrities and non-Indigenous participants and framed by themes including expressing the problem as first-person experience, offering solutions, reporting, performing empty statements, and expressing US-centrism. Drawing on critiques of connective action and our analysis of the Instagram platform, we suggest that these findings are indicative of the tensions negotiated between incorporating allies on platforms that prioritise sharing first-person experiences; balancing the communicative capacities of Instagram with its inherently commercialised digital cultures; and, drawing on the spreadability of global digital movements while maintaining cultural specificity for local activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interprets macroscopic charcoal (>250 μm), humification and loss-on-ignition over the last ∼14 200 cal. BP from Goochs Swamp, located to the west of Sydney in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. This study aimed to investigate relationships between humans, climate and fire through time, primarily by comparison of these palaeoenvironmental indices with archaeological evidence from the region. Climatic forcing can explain all periods of change in the history of fire at Goochs Swamp: fire activity was variable during the Lateglacial-Holocene transition, low during the relatively stable climate of the early Holocene, and high but variable after the onset of modern El Niño from the mid Holocene. Although the dominant control on fire in this environment during the Holocene appears to be climate, fluctuations in the late Holocene may reflect anthropogenic fire or human responses to climate change. The archaeological record of the Blue Mountains and other parts of the Sydney Basin illustrates that Aboriginal people altered subsistence, resource and land-use patterns in the late Holocene. We propose that these cultural measures were adopted to overcome new risks as the frequency of ENSO events increased, and the natural fire regime and resource reliability changed. These strategies perhaps included a more systematic use of fire. The most parsimonious interpretation of the evidence for changes in fire activity at Goochs Swamp in the light of nearby archaeological evidence is that Aboriginal people used fire within a changing climatic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of Copyright Registers by photographers and other artists provides a useful barometer of cultural assumptions over the period from the 1870s to the 1950s. This paper will explore images that both appropriate and subvert anthropological claims about Aboriginality. It is possible to demonstrate that whilst the field appears to require an engagement with anthropologically-derived visual constructions of 'authenticity' and 'Aboriginality', commercial photographers used this anchoring as a base from which to project diverse and contested claims of Aboriginality. I will argue, however, that commercial photographers did not so much diminish or contaminate an anthropological paradigm as extend a rhetorical activity of inventing and reinventing authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Creative Nation, sport is distinguished by its almost complete absence, except as a competitor for sponsorship with 'cultural organisations', and in brief mentions as content for SBS Radio and Aboriginal community radio stations. Sport is not mentioned at all in the 2011 National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, but in the ensuing policy, Creative Australia, is treated, with art and religion, as one of the 'great markers of culture' in which, distinctively, elite professionalism, amateurism and fandom/appreciation happily co-exist. This article reflects on developments in the Australian sport field over the last two decades, highlighting the management of elite-grass roots and public-private funding tensions, and relevant parallels in the arts field. It addresses the pivotal relationship between the sport and broadcast media fields, arguing that sport, as a Bourdieusian 'field of struggles', is an under-appreciated domain of national cultural policy in which different forms of capital collide and converge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional sport is often cited as an arena in which members of racial minorities can achieve high status and public success. In Australia, Aboriginal players are over-represented among the ranks of players in the highest levels of the nation's premier football code, the Australian Football League, yet are conspicuously under-represented in the formal honours awarded in this league. This paper examines the votes awarded during the AFL's 'best and fairest' competition during the 2001 season, and investigates the extent to which the votes awarded to players are accounted for by objective indicators of performance (match statistics). We found that most of the variance in votes could be attributed to objective match statistics, and there was no evidence of any effect of players' race on voting after match statistics were controlled. However, there was some indication that the opportunities for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal players may not be equivalent; no Aboriginal player was named in a 'key position' for any club in the 2001 season. The results are discussed in terms of the structural barriers that may explain why, despite over 100 years of acclaim on the field, Aboriginal players are still largely excluded from the most senior roles and responsibilities in their football clubs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early 1970s, large numbers of Aboriginal people became tenants of the Housing Commission of New South Wales under the Housing for Aborigines program. Most moved from government reserves or dilapidated and overcrowded private rental dwellings to broadacre suburban estates. As public housing tenants, they encountered considerable pressures to become 'respectable' citizens, to build their lives around privacy, sobriety, moral restraint, the nuclear family, conventional gender roles and wage labour. For many indigenous Australians, these expectations--which were based as much on class relations as on colonialism--represented a threat to their conventional ways of life and their obligations to extended family and community. This paper explores the patterns of conformity and resistance amongst Aboriginal tenants. It draws on the sociological and cultural studies literature on youth subcultural resistance and compares anthropological theory about indigenous responses to the pressures of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nascent spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is a promising development that expands conceptual resources and offers useful correctives to existing scholarship. However, the turn to space and place tends not to adequately emplace itself (including on its own European-derived terms) or sufficiently engage the socio-spatial difference of diverse peoples. Instead, a de-contextualised knower is invited to apply a new set of mobile scholarly tools in various settings without seriously considering diverse peoples' conceptualisation and operationalisation of place in socio-political ordering. Long-standing Aboriginal Australian approaches to place, meanwhile, indicate the diversity and sophistication of approaches to space and place. They furthermore show that western political ontology – including the figures of the individual and the state embedded in much dominant scholarship – may not be relevant in many settings in which peace and conflict scholarship is undertaken. Realising the full potential of the spatial turn requires grappling with the relational emplacement of the knowing subject and the varied ways in which place configures socio-political order both for diverse peoples 'in the field' and in the centres of dominant forms of knowing in the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers what successful working relationships between fly-in professionals and Aboriginal community workers involve. Interviews with six Aboriginal workers and the experience of the jointly delivered Let's Start parent–child programme in remote north Australian Indigenous communities confirm the importance of developing positive relationships within a both-ways learning approach, drawing on each other's strengths, and the significance of reflection on practice. Working cooperatively enables effective programme implementation, supports incorporation of new learning into practice, and benefits local Aboriginal community members through employment and development opportunities. This model has relevance for health and community programmes delivered in remote Aboriginal communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical commentary about the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) has included the claim that the media presented a simplistic and stereotyped image of Aboriginal communities at the time of its introduction in 2007, but to date there has been no systematic analysis to support this. This study addresses this research gap through a critical discourse analysis of reportage of the NTER in mainstream and Aboriginal populist print media. The findings reveal major differences in these accounts, with radically different propositions and normative assumptions. Mainstream media were overwhelmingly negative in their portrayal of remote Aboriginal communities, were silent about Aboriginal resistance and portrayed urgent Commonwealth intervention as necessary and heroic. The Aboriginal media provided contextualised accounts of the issues and focused intensely on the human rights implications of the intervention. The findings reveal a concerning racialised divide in representations of the issues facing remote Aboriginal communities in 2007 that helps to explain why the Australian public accepted policies that discriminated against Australia’s First Nations peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, rural areas, non-English speaking backgrounds and those who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, have traditionally been underrepresented in higher education in Australia. The UC 4 Yourself experience day is an outreach program by the University of Canberra for schools identified as having substantial numbers of students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds. It provides a full day of participation in, and gaining information about, university life. The current article reports on two survey studies (N = 525; N = 183) investigating the effectiveness of this program. Students who participated in the program were more likely to plan to attend university and were better able to imagine themselves as university students after their campus visit. Findings from the two studies suggest that the actual visit, despite its brevity, provides a unique experience by simultaneously establishing a knowledge base and facilitating the psychological transformation necessary to imagine a new future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-20th century, scientists began to collect and freeze blood samples for a range of purposes. This article considers the broader implications of scientific freezing for conceptions of time and life by drawing on empirical research with scientists associated with a large collection of samples assembled from Indigenous Australians in the 1960s. We first review some key critiques of cryopreservation posed by Indigenous scholars and by science and technology studies. We then propose ‘cryopolitics’ as a concept to express the various political, ethical and temporal conundrums presented by the practice of freezing. We frame cryopolitics as a mode of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. If biopolitical assemblages make live and let die, cryopolitical ones reveal the dramatic consequences of mundane efforts to make live and not let die. In our case study, we argue that frozen blood vacillates between two cryopolitical states, ‘latent life’ and ‘incomplete death’. Samples seen as latent life cannot be destroyed; samples understood as incomplete death require destruction. A state of incomplete death can be resolved through the return of blood samples to the Indigenous groups they were collected from, a process that has occurred in North America. Our cryopolitical analysis suggests another potential resolution: reviving a form of latent life aligned with futures envisaged by Indigenous communities themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article questions the foundational binary ‘anarchy–bureaucracy’ and the multiple articulations at play in the state’s refraction of anarchic qualities onto Indigenous Australians. Launching from the Northern Territory Emergency Response of June 2007, in which the Australian government assumed direct control of 73 Aboriginal communities in the north of Australia, it asks why bureaucracy is considered the antonym of anarchy and not its synonym. In mobilizing accounts of anarchic Aboriginal depravity to authorize an ongoing bureau-professional presence in Indigenous worlds, links to other matters of interest, such as the state’s dependence on mining revenues, let alone any account of the affective dimension of policy life, were removed from view. Reconsideration of the anarchy–state binary offers a lens to explore the emotional compulsions that are suppressed in the work of upholding the myth of a rational state and how this suppression further authorizes ongoing (anarchic) interventions into Indigenous worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aboriginal people who die in custody face two forms of exclusion: one evident in their disproportionately high imprisonment rates; the other in their traditional lack of voice in the media. This latter exclusion comes about through journalistic practices that privilege authoritative sources and emphasise distance. Janet Beetson was one of fourteen Aboriginal people to die in custody in 1994, a record year for Aboriginal prison deaths. At the time, her death went largely unremarked in the mainstream media. 'The Girl in Cell 4' was published in 1997 about these 1994 events. It was not breaking news: its aim was to tell in detail the story of the last week of Janet Beetson's life through an investigation of what led to her avoidable death. This article charts the critical importance of Janet Beetson's family members in bringing the story to public attention in a way that honoured their loved one and called to account the systems that allowed her to die. This journalist-source collaboration challenges orthodox ideas about arm's length reporting, and indicates that such collaboration can provide for social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements, like every other aspect of life, have become increasingly reliant on the internet for networking, information sharing and coalition building. This is the case even for disadvantaged groups with few resources and less capacity for utilizing computers and the internet. Aboriginal activists in Townsville have been slow to exert their presence on the web, but are gradually becoming savvy in the use of electronic networking in furthering their cause. They rely on listservs, blogs and, more recently, social networking sites to make their struggle known to a wide audience. In addition to the use of Web 2.0 to supplement ‘offline’ activism, there is a new form of ‘virtual’ activism emerging. The rise in ‘push-button activism’ increases the opportunities for everyday engagement with the state by social movement participants. However, it also changes the notion of participation as marches and demonstrations give way to electronic petitions and Facebook fan pages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the myth of the supposed superiority of the desert noble savage over civilized man. With the Bedouin of Arabia and the Aborigines of Australia as its two prime examples, the article argues that two versions of this myth can be traced: one in which the desert noble savage is valorized due to his valour, physical prowess and martial skill (Bedouin); and another, later version, where the desert noble savage is valorized as a pacifist, an ecologist and a mythmaker/storyteller (Aborigines). The article concludes by examining the way in which this turn from one type of desert noble savage to another reflects the manner in which western modernity has shifted its values from Cartesian dualities and Enlightenment rationalism to that of networks, potentialities, ecology and myth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study in Australia's race relations, focusing on tensions between urban Aborigines and recently resettled African refugees, particularly among young people. Both of these groups are of low socio-economic status and are highly visible in the context of a predominantly white Australia. The relationship between them, it is argued, reflects the history of strained race relations in modern Australia and a growing antipathy to multiculturalism. Specific reasons for the tensions between the two populations are suggested, in particular, perceptions of competition for material (housing, welfare, education) and symbolic (position in a racial hierarchy) resources. Finally, it is argued that the phenomenon is deeply embedded in class and race issues, rather than simply in youth violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1993, Aboriginal Australian rules footballer Nicky Winmar mounted a protest against racism in the game by approaching abusive supporters of an opposing team, lifting his jersey and pointing to his black skin. The now famous photograph which captured the incident condenses in a single image a key moment in the long history of struggle by Indigenous Australians for cultural recognition and economic equality. Taking the photograph as its cue, this article explores the ways in which Australia's residual white-settler culture continues to exclude certain groups from national belonging. In particular, it is argued that Winmar and other black sports stars of the early 1990s were able to challenge the unofficial code of 'mateship' in Australian male culture which, more recently, has been an important bulwark of the country's post-9/11 neo-nationalist mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the central role played by vehicles in a contradictory set of social processes that have unfolded in western Arnhem Land, north Australia, over the last five decades. Motor vehicles have mediated much of humanity's experience of the world over the past century. Kuninjku people's interaction with motor vehicles, we argue, provides one revealing lens through which to explore a distinctive and ambiguous experience of modernity. This article explores the role vehicles play in mediating Kuninjku interaction across diverse arenas - their customary lands, an expanding regional social universe occupied by kin, the Australian nation-state, and finally an increasingly globalized world. Briefly exploring the process by which vehicles were introduced into Kuninjku country, we then track key transformations in Kuninjku life through a series of historical phases. The distinctive Kuninjku values that govern use of vehicles are explored. In conclusion the article reflects on the paradoxical nature of Kuninjku experience of late modernity and the fragility of their apparent success in realizing their aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a general contextual analysis of the cultural politics of ‘nature’ in Australia's Kakadu National Park and culminating in an analysis of the ways in which two interpretative centres contribute to the discursive production of the Park, this article is concerned with how differently constructed notions of ‘nature’ converge and conflict in the production of place. It examines the tensions and interplay between settler Australian understandings of Kakadu National Park based on what are perceived to be its natural and cultural heritage values, and the efforts made by Bininj/Mungguy to encourage the understanding of the Park as an Aboriginal place. By drawing out the tensions between a discourse of universal nature and the production of an overtly socialized local nature by Bininj/Mungguy, the article explores how different kinds of nature are constructed and contested in a particular place based context. By politicising the public representations made of ‘nature’ in the joint management of Kakadu National Park, this article reveals a site of discursive struggle where the established norms of the national park institution work to naturalize place, paralyse politics and entrench the dominant order of things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a qualitative study of social capital within an urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context. Using data generated from 100 Aboriginal and Tortes Strait Islander participants in focus group discussions and in-depth interviews collected by Aboriginal community development workers, this article describes two worlds of social capital available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The primary source of bonding social capital comes from family and wider Aboriginal and Tortes Strait Islander community connections. In the context of an oppressive history and experiences of ongoing racism and discrimination, a second world of bridging social capital remains elusive to many Indigenous Australians. Our findings suggest that to understand the tensions between the two social capitals requires an engagement with the complexities of identity. We argue that it is vital to explore the texture of social capital, rather than just measure its volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous sovereignty as an area of study is usually analysed by legal scholars and political theorists who locate it within a judicio-political frame work. This article is offered as a work in progress to stimulate sociological thinking about Indigenous sovereignty in a different way. The article considers recent work in Whiteness studies in Australia and abroad, as well as literature using Foucault's idea of the relationship between race, sovereignty and war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-Indigenous conceptions of Indigeneity have historically focused on controlling the socialization, mobility and reproduction of Indigenous people. In the Indigenous community, we have only recently begun to demarcate our own space in which to debate the nature of Indigeneity in Australia, To date, we have successfully deployed notions of Indigeneity, via the strategic essentialism of pan-Aboriginality, to create an effective political community. However, such a deployment of Indigeneity also results in every Indigenous Australian being interpellated, without regard to their individuality, through stereotyped images that exist in the popular imagination. The essentialized Indigeneity thus formed coalesces around specific fantasies of exclusivity, cultural alterity, marginality, physicality and morality, which leave an increasing number of Indigenous people vulnerable to accusations of Inauthenticity. Only by decoupling Indigeneity from such essentialist fantasies can we acknowledge the richness of Indigenous diversity and start on the path towards true reconciliation in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent calls for sociology to develop a greater engagement with Indigenous issues provide a unique opportunity to enfranchise Indigenous peoples' voices and experiences in both the discipline and the mainstream academy. In this article I seek to establish a position that reflects my understandings of the indigenous lived experience and its expression within sociology, simultaneously recognizing and challenging the way in which these understandings are shaped by discourses of both Western hegemony and marginality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a study to understand family violence among the Indigenous communities of Australia. The author explains that analyzing the social issues experienced by indigenous Australians from the perspective of colonization, oppression and dispossession has long been known to be fundamental to sound social policy. The study was commissioned in 2001 by Weena Mooga Gu Gudba Inc., an Indigenous women's organization in Ceduna, South Australia. The aim of the study was to understand family violence in the Aboriginal community. Ceduna is a remote town in western South Australia with a population in 2001 of around 3500 people, 24 percent of whom are Aboriginal. This article informs that at least two of the research team, including at least one Aborigine, conducted each interview and focus group. Most interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, with detailed notes being taken of the others, the workshop and the forums. Participants experienced family violence as incorporating and embedded in many forms of violence. The study also found that forms of violence include physical, emotional and material violence towards women and children.

The article explores the diverse understandings of the body and contrasts different emic conceptualizations. The author focuses on the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurts Island, in North Australia, with whom he has been working since 1980. He will also refer to ballet, a Western theatre dance form he had been involved in for most of his life.

The European settlement of Australia from 1788 was accompanied by a prolonged dis-possession of the indigenous people, who became British subjects at law. Regimes of punishment played an important role in this dispossession. Focusing on the colonies of latest settlement, Western Australia and Queensland, the evidence here suggests also that conventional modes of punishment were modified to accommodate indigenous offending. Public execution and corporal punishment of Aborigines was practised after their exclusion as options for the settler population -- but imprisonment too was shaped to the end of managing a seemingly intractable indigenous population. In completing the process of dispossession, the colonial state developed less violent punitive resources to manage the indigenous population. Incarceration within unique institutions, segre-gation from the settler population and surveillance and regulation through an expand-ing bureaucracy were strategies of social control increasingly deployed in an attempt to address the distinctive challenges posed by a dispossessed indigenous population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the representation of indigenous Australian histories in the local media. Use of narratives of nationhood to uncover the modes of institutionalized silences governing public discourses with regard to Aboriginal histories; Media coverage of the Port Arthur incident in Tasmania, where a lone gunman killed 35 people; Media silences on aboriginal massacres.

The article focuses on the Points System method which requires televisions stations to broadcast more indigenous programming in Australia. It mentions that television stations broadcasting indigenous programming would receive points from the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) and those that would not follow the imposed quotas would lose their license. It notes that the Australian television industry argues that the system requirements are costly, the viewing public does want more Australian programming, and that system will cause low Australian programming quality. Moreover, the success of the Points System is associated with the financing issues of the industry.