Bulletin

Issue: June 2005

Books

Aboriginal Victorians - telling it like it was

La Trobe University historian, Dr Richard Broome, may well have driven the final nail into the coffin of Terra Nullius with the launch of his latest book, Aboriginal Victorians: A History since 1800.

Published by Allen and Unwin, Sydney 2005, the book was launched in early June.

An Associate Professor in La Trobe's History program, Dr Broome is one of Australia's most respected scholars of Aboriginal history.

His book explains how early settlers saw Victoria and its rolling grasslands as Australia felix - happy south land - a prize left for Englishmen by God.

However, for its original inhabitants this country was home and life, not to be relinquished without a fierce struggle. Dr Broome's book tells the story of the impact of European ideas, guns, killer microbes and a pastoral economy on the networks of kinship, trade and cultures that various Aboriginal peoples of Victoria had developed over millennia.

From first settlement to the present, he shows how Aboriginal families have coped with ongoing disruption and displacement, and how individuals and groups have challenged the system.

With painful stories of personal loss as well as many successes, Dr Broome outlines how Aboriginal Victorians survived near-decimation to become a vibrant community today.

The first history of black-white interaction in Victoria to the present, Aboriginal Victorians offers new insights into frontier conflict, attempts at control and assimilation, the Stolen Generation, and Aboriginal survival and identity in modern Australia.

Based on consultation with Aboriginal communities and families, as well as historical research, the book describes how, over two centuries, Aborigines have had to adapt to the strangers who brought new ways and terrible calamities.

One reviewer, Mr Tony Barta, Visiting Fellow in History at La Trobe University, said that the book tells the story in pictures as well as words. He said many of the images are unfamiliar, and everyone who encounters them will recognise how hopelessly stereotyped popular conceptions of Aborigines have continued to be.

During his research, Dr Broome found people who thought there were no Aborigines left in Victoria.

He began his book with these words: 'People do not cease to be Aboriginal due to their skin being lightened by inter-mingling and inter-marriage with lighter-skinned groups.

'Nor do people cease to be Aboriginal because they no longer use spears or digging sticks and choose or come to live materially like other Australians. Cultures can and do change, and people can and do reinvent themselves, while still retaining core cultural values that define them as different from other groups.'