White, John Matthew
Description
Aside from notable exceptions, the nature and variety of Indigenous participation in
Australian settler economies has been largely neglected in the anthropological and
historical literature. In the Eurobodalla region of the New South Wales south coast,
there has been a significant disjuncture in the regional literature between anglocentric
local histories, and research that acknowledges Aboriginal people through historical
investigations or through the collection of oral histories. There...[Show more] is also a significant
gap in the anthropological literature between the early ethnographies, specific studies
on Aboriginal labour and social conditions that were biased by ideological
presuppositions, and recent work undertaken in relation to judicial processes.
This thesis combines theorising of intercultural domains with a utili sation of notions
of economic hybridity to examine the history of settler-Indigenous relations in the
Eurobodalla and the character of emergent complexes of transactions that entailed a
highly plural range of intercultural interactions, which transformed both Indigenous
and settler subjectivities. The thesis is grounded in historical and local specificity
while it places 'the local' within a broader geopolitical context. Drawing on both
anthropological and historical approaches, the thesis argues that present socioeconomic
conditions in south coast Aboriginal communities can only be understood
through the broader historical context.
The thesis examines the highly localised character of the changes brought about by
European colonisation and the gradual expansion of the settler economy in the
Eurobodalla during the early-mid 19th
century. Aboriginal people were drawn into the
emerging settler economy through reciprocal relationships of labour, while the
presence of settlers was also incorporated into pre-existing, dynamic patterns of
economy and sociality. The evidence suggests that semi-nomadic patterns of mobility
persisted well into the 20th
century, despite the efforts of the Aborigines Protection
Board to curtail this movement. The period between the 1940s and 1970s is
remembered as a relatively bounded era in which Aboriginal families were both on
the run from ' the welfare', and following patterns of seasonal movement (or 'beats').
Aboriginal people were broadly employed in forestry work and seasonal vegetable
picking until both industries collapsed in the late 1970s. Through a range of factors,
including industry decline, increases in Indigenous political agency, the provision of
town housing, welfare and citizenship entitlements and generational change,
Aboriginal people in the Eurobodalla have experienced a fraught transition to the era
of so-called 'self determination'.
The thesis also seeks to 'muddy the waters' of some widespread, but erroneous,
generalisations about settler-Indigenous relations and the manifestation of government
policies. It identities several historical moments (or processes) that are comparable to
trajectories of settler-Indigenous relations elsewhere in Australia. In doing so, this
thesis makes a contribution to knowledge by providing a localised and historically situated
case study o f settler-Indigenous relations. Research of this type has the
potential to mediate the extreme positions generated by the ' history wars'.
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