Growing Up In Central Australia

Surprisingly little research has been carried out about how Australian Aboriginal children and teenagers experience life, shape their social world and imagine the future. This volume presents recent and original studies of life experiences outside the institutional settings of childcare and education, of those growing up in contemporary Central Australia or with strong links to the region. Focusing on the remote communities – roughly 1,200 across the continent – the volume includes case studies of language and family life in small country towns and urban contexts. These studies expertly show that forms of consciousness have changed enormously over the last hundred years for Indigenous societies more so than for the rest of Australia, yet equally notable are the continuities across generations.

The ultimate book about growing up in Australia – a choice selection of wonderful stories and recollections This special collection is the perfect introduction to Black Inc.’s definitive ‘Growing Up’ series. Featuring pieces from Growing Up Asian, Growing Up Aboriginal, Growing Up African, Growing Up Queer and Growing Up Disabled in Australia, it captures the diversity of our nation in moving and revelatory ways. Growing Up in Australia also features gems from essential Australian memoirs such as Rick Morton’s 100 Years of Dirt and Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning. Contributors include Tim Winton, Benjamin Law, Anna Goldsworthy, Nyadol Nyuon, Tara June Winch and many more. With a foreword by Alice Pung, this anthology is a wonderful gift for adult and adolescent readers alike.

Childhood stories of family, country and belonging What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart – sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect. This groundbreaking collection will enlighten, inspire and educate about the lives of Aboriginal people in Australia today. Contributors include: Tony Birch, Deborah Cheetham, Adam Goodes, Terri Janke, Patrick Johnson, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jack Latimore, Celeste Liddle, Amy McQuire, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Miranda Tapsell, Jared Thomas, Aileen Walsh, Alexis West, Tara June Winch, and many, many more. Winner, Small Publisher Adult Book of the Year at the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards ‘Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is a mosaic, its more than 50 tiles – short personal essays with unique patterns, shapes, colours and textures – coming together to form a powerful portrait of resilience.’ —The Saturday Paper ‘... provides a diverse snapshot of Indigenous Australia from a much needed Aboriginal perspective.’ —The Saturday Age

People and Change in Indigenous Australia arose from a conviction that more needs to be done in anthropology to give a fuller sense of the changing lives and circumstances of Australian indigenous communities and people. Much anthropological and public discussion remains embedded in traditionalizing views of indigenous people, and in accounts that seem to underline essential and apparently timeless difference. In this volume the editors and contributors assume that “the person” is socially defined and reconfigured as contexts change, both immediate and historical. Essays in this collection are grounded in Australian locales commonly termed “remote.” These indigenous communities were largely established as residential concentrations by Australian governments, some first as missions, most in areas that many of the indigenous people involved consider their homelands. A number of these settlements were located in proximity to settler industries—pastoralism, market-gardening, and mining—locales that many non-indigenous Australians think of as the homes of the most traditional indigenous communities and people. The contributors discuss the changing circumstances of indigenous people who originate from such places, revealing a diversity of experiences and histories that involve major dynamics of disembedding from country and home locales, re-embedding in new contexts, and reconfigurations of relatedness. The essays explore dimensions of change and continuity in childhood experience and socialization in a desert community; the influence of Christianity in fostering both individuation and relatedness in northeast Arnhem Land; the diaspora of Central Australian Warlpiri people to cities and the forms of life and livelihood they make there; adolescent experiences of schooling away from home communities; youth in kin-based heavy metal gangs configuring new identities, and indigenous people of southeast Australia reflecting on whether an “Aboriginal way” can be sustained. By taking a step toward understanding the relation between changing circumstances and changing lives of indigenous Australians, the volume provides a sense of the quality and feel of those lives.

Enriched with findings from anthropological scholarship, this book provides a guide to childhood in different cultures, past and present.

Adolescents are at a critical life stage where they will soon be able to contribute to the wellbeing of humankind, or do it great harm. Consequently, it is vital that the challenges and possibilities of adolescence be well understood and addressed. In Australia, such understanding is urgently needed with respect to Aboriginal adolescents. Not only must they adjust to their changing bodies and minds, but they must negotiate these changes within a context usually characterised by racism and poverty. They must also do this within intercultural environments that include the disparate and sometimes incompatible beliefs and practices of their multicultural populations. The chapters in this collection address these challenges to Aboriginal adolescents in the Northern Territory and the intercultural contexts in which they take place. Their discussions include the adolescents’ experiences with health and health care, education, and the criminal justice system. They also address their hopes, dreams, plans and politics, engagement with social media, food preferences and nutrition, engagement with language, family, and changing mores affecting sexual behaviour and marriage. The book aims to provide readers with a greater understanding of the day-to-day lives of Aboriginal adolescents, and some of the adults who care for or neglect them. It seeks to provide readers with a better understanding of the circumstances, processes and factors that affect adolescent health, wellbeing and future prospects in their intercultural environments, and glimpse the multiplicity of these circumstances, processes and factors and the complexity of their interaction.

Some indigenous people, while remaining attached to their traditional homelands, leave them to make a new life for themselves in white towns and cities, thus constituting an “indigenous diaspora”. This innovative book is the first ethnographic account of one such indigenous diaspora, the Warlpiri, whose traditional hunter-gatherer life has been transformed through their dispossession and involvement with ranchers, missionaries, and successive government projects of recognition. By following several Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, far from their home settlements, this book explores how they sustained their independent lives, and examines their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.

Aboriginal children represent one of the fastest growing population segments in Australia, yet the lives of Aboriginal children in their environment has rarely been subjected to systematic and in-depth study. In this book, Angela Kreutz considers the relationship between the environment, attachment and development in indigenous children, examining theoretical constructs and conceptual models by empirically road testing these ideas within a distinct cultural community. The book presents the first empirical study on Australian Aboriginal children’s lives from within the field of child-environment studies, employing an environmental psychology perspective, combined with architectural and anthropological understandings. Chapters offer valuable insights into participatory planning and design solutions concerning Aboriginal children in their distinct community environment, and the cross-cultural character of the case study illuminates the commonalities of child development, as well as recognising the uniqueness that stems from specific histories in specific places. Children and the Environment in an Australian Indigenous Community makes significant theoretical, methodological and practical contributions to the international cross disciplinary field of child-environment studies. It will be of key interest to researchers from the fields of environmental, ecological, developmental and social psychology, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and those studying the environment and planning.