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The central hypothesis of this thesis is that aspects of the use of kinterms in Arandic languages (or dialects) are dependent upon pragmatic factors to do with broad levels of relationship beyond the genealogical, especially those between people and country, and between countries and Dreamings. It is suggested that other pragmatic factors such as the notions of closeness and distance are significant in determining the use of kinterms. Through an analysis of ‘unexpected’ uses of kinterms it is shown that systematic patterns of skewing exist in Arandic systems, and the factors which determine this are explored. Particular types of kin are marked by the use of specialised kinterms, by respectful codes of behaviour, and by the use of special registers.

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.

Kanyirninpa, or holding, exists as a deeply embedded value amongst desert Aboriginal peoples (Puntu). It is disclosed as authority with nurturance, where older generations assume the responsibility to care for and look after younger people. Kanyirninpa also holds in balance two other key cultural patterns of desert life, autonomy and relatedness. These values are transmitted across generations where they provide desert society with identity, cohesion and strength. While kanyirninpa can be identified in the nurturance provided a child after birth, its presence and power is particularly disclosed at ceremonial time. Here, the meanings of the ancestral tjukurrpa (dreaming) are celebrated and renewed. Desert society is reproduced as the deeper, social and cosmic meanings around ngurra (land), walytja (family) and tjukurrpa are gathered, ritualised and re-enacted. The older generations of men and women enable this holding to occur. When boys (marnti) become men (wati) the manner of kanyirninpa changes. No longer do young men seek to be held by their mothers and female relations. Instead, they seek to be held by older men: brothers, uncles and other males. By holding them older men induct younger men into the social meanings and behaviours of desert, male adulthood. A generative and generational male praxis is disclosed.

Research on racism in Australia by white psychologists is often fraught with tensions surrounding a) accounting for privilege, b) the depiction of particular racial minorities, and c) how individual acts of racism are understood. Nowhere is this more evident than in research that focuses on the relationship between Indigenous and white Australians. Such research, as this thesis will demonstrate, has at times failed to provide an account of the ongoing acts of racism that shape the discipline of psychology, and which thus inform how white psychologists in Australia write about Indigenous people. As a counter to this, I outline in this thesis an alternate approach to understanding racism in Australia, one that focuses on the ways in which racism is foundational to white subjectivities in Australia, and one that understands white violence against Indigenous people as an ongoing act. In order to explicate these points, and to examine what they mean in relation to white claims to belonging in Australia, I employ psychoanalytic concepts within a framework of critical psychology in order to develop an account of racism which, whilst drawing on the insights afforded by social constructionist approaches to racism and subjectivity, usefully extends such approaches in order to understand their import for examining racism in Australia. More specifically, I demonstrate how racism in Australia displays what Hook (2005) refers to as a 'psychic life of colonial power', one that implicates all people in histories of racism, and one that highlights the collective psychical nature of racism, rather than understanding it as an individual act. In the analyses that follow from this framework I demonstrate how white privilege and its corollary - the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty - are warranted by white Australians. To do this, I engage in a textual analysis of empirical data, focusing on both the everyday talk of white Australians as gathered via focus groups and a speech by Prime Minister Howard. In particular, I highlight how claims by white Australians to 'doing good' for Indigenous people (what I refer to as 'benevolence') may in fact be seen to evidence one particular moment where the originary violence of colonisation is yet again played out in the name of the white nation. More specifically, and following Ahmed (2004), I suggest that claims to 'anti-racism' may be seen as 'non-performatives' - they do not require white Australians to actually challenge our unearned privilege, nor to examine how we are located within racialised networks of power. In contrast to this, I sketch out an approach to examining racism, both within the discipline of psychology and beyond, that is accountable for ongoing histories of colonial violence, which acknowledges the role that the discipline often continues to play in the legitimation of race, and which is willing to address the relationship that white Australians are already in with Indigenous Australians. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Psychology, 2005.

This thesis seeks to understand the historical factors that contributed to Aboriginal workers being included in pastoral industry unions as comrades, or treated as competitors with white unionists for jobs and income. It explores the changing characteristics and nature of Australian Workers union (AWU) and North Australian Workers Union (NAWU) relations with Aboriginal workers, and internal union and external factors affecting these relations. It challenges long held views that unions excluded Aboriginal workers simply because of the racism of white members and automatically included them when there was a union leadership commitment to class solidarity regardless of race. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2007