Mabos Cultural Legacy

History, Literature, Film and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Australia

Edited by Geoff Rodoreda, Eva Bischoff

Publication date:

08 June 2021

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781785274244

More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the High Court of Australia’s 1992 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 landmark legal decision on various forms of Australian culture and cultural practice. How is Australia’s post-Mabo imaginary being reflected, refracted and articulated in contemporary film, fiction, poetry, biography and other forms of cultural expression? To what extent has the discussion and practice of history, linguistics, anthropology and other branches of the humanities been challenged or transformed by Mabo? While the judges in Mabo recognised native title, they also denied Indigenous people sovereignty over the continent: how is First Nations sovereignty being articulated and creatively imagined in more recent post-Mabo discourse? This interdisciplinary book, offering a transnational perspective via scholars based in Australia, continental Europe and the UK, provides an overview of the diverse impact and discursive influence of Mabo on fields of artistic endeavour and cultural practice in Australia today.

Acknowledgements; Introduction, Geoff Rodoreda and Eva Bischoff; PART I. MAKING HISTORY; Chapter 1. Activism before Mabo: A View from the Southeast, Lynette Russell and Rachel Standfield; Chapter 2. Remembering Koiki and Bonita Mabo, Pioneers of Indigenous Education, Paul Turnbull; PART II. MABO IN POLITICS AND PRACTICE; Chapter 3. Responsibility = Ownership? An Ethnographic Moment in Native Title, Carsten Wergin; Chapter 4. The Contributions of Linguistics to Native Title Claims, Christina Ringel; PART III. MABO AND FILM; Chapter 5. Australian Indigenous Filmmaking Beyond Mabo: The Emergence of Indigenous Australian Visual Sovereignty, Romaine Moreton and Therese Davis; Chapter 6. Filmic Representations of Eddie Mabo in a Changing Cultural Imaginary, Renate Brosch; Chapter 7. Torres Strait Screen Media ‘Post- Mabo’: Between Representation and Institution, Peter Kilroy; PART IV. FICTION AND POETRY; Chapter 8. Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby: The FemaleBody as the Locus of Knowing and Tradition, Philip Morrissey; Chapter 9. Writing the Land, Writing Relations: Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Dorothee Klein; Chapter 10. Aboriginal Jurisprudence in Philip McLaren’s Lightning Mine, Katrin Althans; Chapter 11. Rewriting History, Rewriting Identity: Terra Nullius in Australian Poetry after Mabo, Lioba Schreyer; PART V. MABO AND MEMOIR; Chapter 12. Are We Better Than This?: Stan Grant and the Post-Mabo Blues, Lars Jensen; Chapter 13. Beyond Native Title: Literary Justice in the Post-Mabo Memoir, Kieran Dolin; List of Contributors; Index.

“This book makes a major contribution to indigenous studies in Australia. It continues and extends the valuable work of Rodoreda in assessing the impact of the Mabo decision in Australian culture. The strengths of the book lie in the range of its analysis, facilitated by the range of subject areas and the number of contributors. The essays are scholarly and extend the work on Australian (both indigenous and non-indigenous) cultural developments after the Mabo decision in ways that provide a comprehensive context for considerations of the progress of Indigenous justice in Australia.” —Bill Ashcroft, Emeritus Professor, The University of New South Wales