Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis submitted to the University of Western Sydney 2006. / Title from electronic thesis (viewed 31/5/10)

Thesis (M.A.P.S.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [137]-142).

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines the representation of Aboriginal people in Australian painting between 1850 and 1900. In particular, the thesis discusses and seeks to account for the decline in the frequency with which Aboriginal people were represented in mainstream academic art in the decades preceding Australia’s Federation in 1901. In addition, this thesis investigates the ways in which a visual discourse of Aboriginality was realised in mid- and late nineteenth-century Australian painting. / The figures of Aboriginal people formed a significant presence in Australian painting from the moment of first contact in the late eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century. I argue that in paintings of the Australian landscape, as well as in portraiture and figure studies produced in the second half of the nineteenth century, images of Aboriginal people were used to signify the primordial difference of the antipodean landscape. In these paintings, Aboriginality emerged as a motif of Australia’s precolonial past: a timeless, arcadian realm that preceded European colonisation, and in which Aboriginal people enjoyed uncontested possession of the Australian landscape. This uncolonised landscape represented the antithesis of colonial civilisation, both spatially and temporally distinct from the colonial nation. / I argue that prior to Federation in 1901, Australian national identity was dependent upon the recognition and construction of a ‘difference’ that was seen to be implicit within the Australian landscape itself. This sense of difference derived from the settlers’ perception of the Australian environment, and became embodied in those objects which appeared most ‘different’ from settlers’ notion of the familiar. Colonial artists drew upon an iconography based upon this recognition of difference to signify the geographical identity of the landscape which they painted. Aboriginal people were central to these icons of ‘Australian-ness’. Further, the association of Aboriginal people with a precolonial Australia served to rationalise acts of colonial dispossession. / Representations of Aboriginal people dressed in a traditional manner, as well as those in which they are portrayed in European costume as ‘white but not quite’, underwrote colonial assertions of Aboriginal ‘primitiveness’ and precluded Aboriginal participation in the foundation of the Australian nation. The strengthening nationalist movement of the 1880s and 1890s meant that a new iconography was needed, one in which the triumph of the white settler culture over indigenous cultures could be celebrated. As a result, Aboriginal people began to disappear from the canvases of Australian artists, replaced by ‘white Aborigines’, who symbolised a new depth in the relationship between setter-Australia and the landscape itself. As well and more broadly, they were replaced by the image of the white frontiersman, the leitmotif of settler culture. This exclusion of Aboriginal people from the conceptualisation of the Australian nation reflects not only their ‘disenfranchisement’ within Australian society, but more significantly reveals the effectiveness with which a visual discourse of ‘Australia’ painted Aboriginal people out of existence.

This thesis examines Aboriginal pastoral workers' life stories in the context of the two mass movements in Kimberley history: the move toward pastoral stations in the 'early days' of this century and away from them in the 1960s and 1970s. In the northern ranges region of the Kimberley pastoral settlement began in 1903, with a second phase of intense settlement from 1920. The recency of settlement in this region meant that in the late 1980s people were alive who had experienced both 'first contact' and the arrival of 'Welfare'. This study places Aboriginal life story narratives in a wider historical context, drawn from written archives and a range of oral testimonies about the origins and development of the pastoral system in the north and central Kimberley. The broader economic and political context which affected the process of incorporating northern ranges people into the Australian nation is examined through individual contacts and biographies to develop the patterns of alliances with 'Bosses' and the impact of Welfare on those relationships. In 1971, small reserves on the outskirts of Kimberley towns which catered for 20 to 40 people in the 1950s, held up to 300 residents who were previously living on pastoral stations. The overcrowded and unserviced fringe camps were thought to contain people displaced from station employment by the decision to enforce equal wages for Aborigines in the pastoral industry. It is one of the contentions of this thesis that the social and economic foundations of the old rationing system on most of the stations in the northern Kimberley were crumbling before the award wages decision and its application to the Kimberley in 1969. The 'eviction after award wages' theme underestimates Aboriginal agency in the migration process, fails to take account of their changing social and economic requirements and the pull of Welfare support, glorifies the period of 'settlement' on stations and reinforces the 'myth of the lazy native' which underpinned public debate and Arbitration Commission discussions in the 1960s about the inclusion of Aboriginal workers within the Pastoral Industry Award.

Thesis (B. Med. Sc.)--University of Melbourne. Menzies School of Health Research, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 342-377). Also available online.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Sydney, 2000. / Title from title screen (viewed Apr. 21, 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science to the Division of Geography, School of Geosciences. Degree awarded 2000; thesis submitted 1999. Includes bibliography. Also available in print form.