« Settler and nonsettler landscapes: Lesley Head, Katarina Saltzman, Gunhild Setten, Marie Stenseke (eds), Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management Scandinavian and Australian perspectives on peoples and landscapes, Routledge, 2016
Again on genocide versus ethnic cleansing: Gary Clayton Anderson, ‘The Native Peoples of the American West: Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2016 »

Decolonising settler archives through storytelling: Anna Haebich, ‘Fever in the Archive’, Thesis Eleven, 135, 1, 2016, pp. 82-98

14Aug16

Abstract: Biography is a metaphor for this critical study of a major Australian archive that holds the records of government departments responsible for the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Western Australian from 1897 to 1972. This artefact of totalitarian state control is structured by western colonial ontologies of bureaucracy and legislative control of subject people. The project of decolonizing this archive was begun in the 1970s by Indigenous writers negotiating between the archives and their own cultural knowledge to produce major creative works combining both. These works show the passionate, rich storytelling that emerges when indigenous people release the stories captured in the archives and restore them as living cultural heritage.


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