Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia

by Diane J. Austin-Broos

The Arrernte people of Central Australia first encountered Europeans in the 1860s as groups of explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and laborers invaded their land. During that time the Arrernte were the subject of intense curiosity, and the earliest accounts of their lives, beliefs, and traditions were a seminal influence on European notions of the primitive. The first study to address the Arrernte’s contemporary situation, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past also documents the immense sociocultural changes they have experienced over the past hundred years.

Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg and the impact of pastoralism on the Western Arrernte (Aranda, Arunta) forced the ontological shift that Austin-Broos details so well. She explains how "the Arrernta's gift for homology through metaphor, for locating the likeness in events and disparate acts, allow(ed) their incorporation into known experience (p31) while "ellipsis, the artful suppression of difference or troubling change," supported these efforts to use the notion of travel to incorporate the journey of the Lutherans from Germany to Hermannsburg, and the biblical travels they were taught about into their own peripatetic wanderings and dreaming tracks that were the foundations of their world view. Her exploration of conception sites, although not adduced in native title applications so much now, fleshes out the appreciation of the inseparability of person, identity and country, that is a the core of native title application. Her chapter on Howard's Intervention and policy shifts in successive governments' attempts to win and hold power by appealing to perceptions of voters in population centres remote from the Western Desert are highly recommended.

[Thomas Isern · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a work I plowed through because of strong interest in the subject, was educated by, but also was exasperated by. The subject is adjustments in aboriginal life in the central Australian locality of Ntaria, or Hermannsburg. Pastoralism, Lutheranism, and modernism were the potent forces the Arrernte people dealt with, navigating their passage through them with varying strategies and degrees of success.

The author is a good observer, recounting fieldwork in the district, when she allows herself to. The problem is she keeps entangling herself in social-scientific duct tape of the anthropological sort. The obvious symptom of this is convoluted sentences spiked with trendy jargon and acronyms. More serious is the problem that as she attends to the anthropologists, continually discoursing on theory and questing for generalizable findings, she loses the thread of narrative, forgets to tell the story of the Arrernte. Let me put this more simply: the book is badly written.

Which is too bad, because buried in the bad prose is an important and interesting study. The early parts of the book are better than the latter. Austin-Broos gives us some compelling portraits of Arrernte people coming to grips with, and appropriating, elements of Lutheranism. It's worth struggling through a lot of verbiage to get to the story of Jesus walking up the Fink River Gorge in a pair of R. M. Williams boots.

In the latter part of the book it seems another factor enters in to make the exposition worse than before. The author has ties to women in her study community. Thus when local aboriginal affairs come under sensational scrutiny early in this century (note release of Little Children Are Sacred in 2007), her analyses become tortured. Much of the exposition here is simply impenetrable.

So, I'll keep this book as a reference on the matters for which it is useful, and seek elsewhere for explanation of the matters for which it is disappointing.