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Occupying what’s occupied: Shaphan Cox, Christina Birdsall-Jones, Roy Jones, Thor Kerr, Steve Mickler, ‘Indigenous persistence and entitlement: Noongar occupations in central Perth, 1988–1989 and 2012’, Journal of Historical Geography, 54, 2016, pp. 13–23

16Aug16

Abstract: In 1988–1989 and again in 2012 Noongar Aboriginal groups occupied high profile riverside sites in close proximity to the centre of Perth, Western Australia. On both occasions they were claiming rights to land from which their ancestors had been removed in the early nineteenth century by British colonial settlers. During a relatively brief period of struggle and interaction between the Indigenous and settler groups following the proclamation of the Swan River Colony in 1829, the Noongar population of what is now the Perth Metropolitan Area were effectively dispossessed of their land. Indeed, from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century Aboriginal people were required to obtain written permits in order to enter the urban area of Perth. In spite of this, the local Noongar population has maintained an ongoing physical, emotional and spiritual connection to their traditional country and, in particular, to certain sites within it. Two of these sites, Goonininup/the Old Swan Brewery, in 1988–1989, and Matagarup/Heirisson Island, in 2012, have been occupied by Noongar groups asserting their rights to this land. This paper will describe and compare both sites of occupation with particular reference to the methods and motivations of the occupiers and the attitudes and responses of the wider metropolitan population to these events. It will also place them in the wider context of ongoing debates over the acknowledgement of Aboriginal claims to and rights over sites of Indigenous significance and of land occupations as a form of protest.


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Re-enacting a re-enactment: Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail A New American Journey, Simon & Schuster, 2015

15Aug16

Description: An epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century—which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West—scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history—it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.

Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as “a funny, cocky gem of a book,” and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life.

Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck is accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an “incurably filthy” Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water. The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since.

But The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling U.S. Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants. Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselves—ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became.

At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses.


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Ben Silverstein on Patrick Wolfe: History Workshop Journal, 2016.

14Aug16

Access the rticle here.


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Again on genocide versus ethnic cleansing: Gary Clayton Anderson, ‘The Native Peoples of the American West: Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2016

14Aug16

Excerpt: If western history has a common thread, it is that conquest and violence went hand in hand. This is not to say that American history east of the Mississippi River is devoid of such a theme; the despicable treatment of black slaves in the South, the Irish in northern cities, or even specific Native groups themselves belies such an argument. But in the West, government officials, army officers, and common settlers often found themselves in disputes with American Indians, and this conflict is at the core of hundreds of books and studies. Indian tribes lost most of these contests, so it is crucial that historians look at the nature of the conflicts and try to understand what they meant—then and now. In many cases, if not most, non-Indians committed crimes against Indians. The question here is what should we call those crimes?


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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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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

11Aug16

Description: How are different concepts of nature and time embedded into human practices of landscape and environmental management? And how can temporalities that entwine past, present and future help us deal with challenges on the ground? In a time of uncertainty and climate change, how much can we hold onto ideals of nature rooted in a pristine and stable past? The Scandinavian and Australian perspectives in this book throw fresh light on these questions and explore new possibilities and challenges in uncertain and changing landscapes of the future.

This book presents examples from farmers, gardens and Indigenous communities, among others, and shows that many people and communities are already actively engaging with environmental change and uncertainty. The book is structured around four themes; environmental futures, mobile natures, indigenous and colonial legacies, heritage and management. Part I includes important contributions towards contemporary environmental management debates, yet the chapters in this section also show how the legacy of older landscapes forms part of the active production of future ones. Part II examines the challenges of living with mobile natures, as it is acknowledged that environments, natures and people do not stand still. An important dimension of the heritage and contemporary politics of Australia, Sweden and Norway is the presence of indigenous peoples. As is clear in part III, the legacies of the colonial past both haunt and energise contemporary land management decisions. Finally, part IV demonstrates how the history and heritage of landscapes, including human activities in those landscapes, are entwined with contemporary environmental management.

The rich empirical content of the chapters exposes the diversity of meanings, practices, and ways of being in nature that can be derived from cultural environmental research in different disciplines. The everyday engagements between people, nature and temporalities provide important creative resources with which to meet future challenges.


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Storytelling and the global settler revolution: Jessie Reeder, ‘William Henry Hudson, Hybridity, and Storytelling in the Pampas’, SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 56, 3, 2016, pp. 561-581

09Aug16

Abstract: This article argues that William Henry Hudson’s novel The Purple Land figures Anglo-Argentine contact in the age of informal empire as constituted through narrative storytelling. Narrative structures encounters among people on local and global levels, and Hudson shows that narrative is simultaneously the most natural conduit and the most stubborn barrier to transnational hybridity on both personal and national scales. This argument locates Hudson, therefore, in the convergence between global exchange, in the specific form of British capital that precipitated Argentine dependence in the world system, and local interpersonal exchange as a site of narrative and nationalist self-fashioning.


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On developing settler orders (the British world, for example): Amanda Behm’, Settler Historicism and Anticolonial Rebuttal in the British World, 1880-1920′, Journal of World History, 26, 4, 2015, pp. 785-813

07Aug16

Abstract: This article seeks to recast the break-up of the British Empire in the light of the longer duel between settler and native, or so-called dependent, interests over the legitimate nature of British connection. It starts from two premises. First, although “Greater Britain” was never a formal political reality, the historical construct of a homogeneous global Anglo-Saxondom attained widespread credibility in late nineteenth century British settler and Anglo-American worlds. Second, such a fact demands an examination of “Greater Britain’s” real work within the fractious politics of the vast, multipolar late British Empire. This article explains why, after 1880, public intellectuals and emerging academic historians working from Britain divided the British Empire into two parts temporally and politically and championed the self-governing colonies at the expense of the non-white, authoritarian empire. It locates an emerging moral consensus at the confluence of late Victorian policy lobbying and historical theorizing, which not only gave the world Greater Britain, but also the exclusionary policies that scholars recognize today as the global color line. It then explores the emergence of a pitched contest between proponents of an increasingly segregated British Empire and those of a more integrated and equal system. While both camps initially staked their claims as part of a broad, multisited, and contested Anglophone network that trafficked in a shared political idiom of liberty, rights, and constitutional development, the repeated betrayal of integrationists by the imperial center opened the way for more radical anticolonial activisms by the 1920s.


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On developing settler orders (India and Van Diemen’s Land, for example): Felicity Barry, ‘“Home Allies”: Female Networks, Tensions, and Conflicted Loyalties in India and Van Diemen’s Land, 1826–1849’, Journal of World History, 26, 4, 2015, pp. 757-784

07Aug16

Abstract: Using two women and their private social networks as a case study, this article expands the scope of the well-established field of Anglophone networks by considering the role women played in forming and operating within them. The reasons for including and excluding others in and from these networks illuminate these women’s highly personalized and politicized ideas about belonging, loyalty, and affiliation to home. Ultimately, this article suggests that while they operated alongside—but outside—of male-centered official and elite networks, these women and their networks still played a role in strengthening or severing particular discourses, connections, and alliances at the local and global level and that they did so in a way that warrants further attention from scholars of the British world and beyond.


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On developing settler orders (in Florida for example): Laurel Clark Shire, The Threshold of Manifest Destiny: Gender and National Expansion in Florida, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

07Aug16

Description: In “The Threshold of Manifest Destiny,” Laurel Clark Shire illuminates the vital role women played in national expansion and shows how gender ideology was a key mechanism in U.S. settler colonialism.


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