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13 results

Mabo's Cultural Legacy
  • History, Literature, Film and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Australia
  • Edited by Geoff Rodoreda, Eva Bischoff
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    23 February 2022
    Print publication:
    08 June 2021
  • In June 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of a claim by a group of Indigenous Australians, led by Eddie Koiki Mabo, to customary, 'native title' to land. In recognising prior Indigenous occupation of the continent, the Mabo decision shook the foundations of white Australia’s belief in the legitimate settlement of the continent by the British. Indeed, more than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo decision challenged previous ways of thinking about land, identity, belonging, the nation and history. Now, more than a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book examines the broader impacts of this ground-breaking legal decision on Australian culture and select forms of cultural practice. While a number of individual studies have focussed on Mabo’s impact on law, politics, film or literature, no single book provides an overview of the diverse impact and discursive influence of Mabo on various fields of artistic endeavour and cultural practice in Australia today. This book fills that gap in literary and cultural enquiry.

    In considering the cultural legacies of the High Court’s landmark decision this book also engages in a critical dialogue with Mabo and post-Mabo discourse. While many Indigenous Australians have benefited, legally and politically from the Mabo decision, the majority of Indigenous peoples have gained nothing, materially, from subsequent native title rulings. In honouring Eddie Mabo's achievement, then, the contributors also recognise that Indigenous sovereignty over the continent was denied by the High Court in Mabo, and that the struggle for the recognition of better and wider land rights recognition continues 'beyond' Mabo.

    Keeping such an acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty in mind, this interdisciplinary book offers a transnational perspective of Mabo’s cultural legacy by presenting the work of scholars based in Australia, continental Europe and the UK.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Geoff Rodoreda, Eva Bischoff
  • Book:
    Mabo's Cultural Legacy
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    23 February 2022
    Print publication:
    08 June 2021, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    A legacy is ‘something that is handed down or remainsfrom a previous generation or time’ (Bloomsbury EnglishDictionary, s.v. ‘legacy’). It may notalways be beneficial. While it can bolster you andprovide you with a solid foundation for futureaction, it can also become a burden, a weight ofhistorical encumbrance. Larissa Behrendt's 2009novel, titled Legacy,captures something of the tension inherent in thebolstering-yet-possibly-burdensome associations ofthis word. Simone Harlowe, the younglawyer-protagonist of the novel, is both emboldenedby her father's history of Aboriginal rightsactivism of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and hamperedin pursuing her goals by that same father's legacyof personal flaws. The legacy of the story's titleencompasses both the public and the private, theleverage and the liability, that becomes the sum ofwhat Simone and her generation must work with toadvance the cause of justice for Aboriginal peoplein the twenty-first century.

    The legacy of the High Court of Australia's decision inMabo and Others v Queensland(No. 2) of 1992, otherwise known as theMabo decision, might likewise be seen as bothleverage and liability. Eddie Koiki Mabo and hisTorres Strait Islander co-claimants ‘changed thelegal and social landscape of Australia’ with theirHigh Court victory (Behrendt 2002, 1). Theysucceeded, for the first time in Australia'shistory, in gaining official and nationwiderecognition that Indigenous Australians were thefirst land owners of the continent. The judges inthe Mabo decision acknowledged that Indigenouspeople had rights to land that should have beenrecognised and respected after British occupation in1788 and that the violent dispossession ofIndigenous peoples from their lands flouted thecommon law and amounted to the greatest ofhistorical injustices. What's more, the High Courtfound that those rights to use ancestral lands mightstill exist and be claimed by other IndigenousAustralians today. Under the framework of the NativeTitle Act of 1993, a claims process was establishedthat has resulted in substantial additions to whatis now called the Indigenous Estate (Pollack 2001;Altman, Buchanan and Larsen 2007).

  • “Heimischwerden Deutscher Art und Sitte” Power, Gender, and Diaspora in the Colonial Contest

  • Eva Bischoff
  • Journal:
    Itinerario / Volume 37 / Issue 1 / April 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    30 April 2013, pp. 43-58

  • In 1909, in a public lecture on German colonial politics, author and colonial activist Clara Brockmann emphasised the crucial role of female emigration to the colonies of the Kaiserreich (German empire). With special reference to German Southwest Africa, she argued:

    The immigration of the German woman in our colony is much talked about and much is done for it. The aim is quite obvious: the prevention of mixed marriages, which are the mental and economic ruin of the settler, the achievement of a profitable farm business, which cannot be fully developed without the assistance of the housewife, and the establishment of German manners and mores, of German family life, which is created foremost by the presence of the woman.

    Brockmann was one of many women who were committed to “the colonial cause” during the Kaiserreich. Most of these activists were organised in the Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (Women's League of the German Colonial Society). Its central aim was to support and organise the emigration of German women to the colonies of the German Empire. This paper takes a closer look at the rhetoric and politics of the Frauenbund, its claims for the decisive role women were to play in the colonial project, its emigration scheme, organised to provide German settlers with racially “appropriate” wives, and its underlying assumption that Germanness itself was under threat in colonial space. The Kaiserreich's female colonial activists have been the object of numerous studies so far. None of these studies, however, reflects on the issue within the larger context of nineteenth-century global white mass migration or white diasporic movements as described, for instance, by Jürgen Osterhammel.