Shino Konishi | Australian Catholic University (original) (raw)
Books by Shino Konishi
This book is a biographical history of Rottnest Island, a small carceral island offshore from Wes... more This book is a biographical history of Rottnest Island, a small carceral island offshore from Western Australia. Rottnest is also known as Wadjemup, or "the place across the water where the spirits are", by Noongar, the Indigenous people of south-western Australia.
Through a series of biographical case studies of the diverse individuals connected to the island, the book argues that their particular histories lend Rottnest Island a unique heritage in which Indigenous, maritime, imperial, colonial, penal, and military histories intersect with histories of leisure and recreation. Tracing the way in which Wadjemup/Rottnest Island has been continually re-imagined and re-purposed throughout its history, the text explores the island’s carceral history, which has left behind it a painful community memory.
Today it is best known as a beach holiday destination, a reputation bolstered by the "quokka selfie" trend, the online posting of photographs taken with the island’s cute native marsupial. This book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in Australian history, Aboriginal history, and the history of the British Empire, especially those interested in the burgeoning scholarship on the concept of "carceral archipelagos" and island prisons.
ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned whith what it meant to be huma... more The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned whith what it meant to be human. This was due at least in part to the increasing awareness of human diversity brought by exploration and travel to new domains.
This collection of essays traces the concept of "humanity" through revolutionary politics, feminist biography, portraiture, explorer narratives, libertine and Orientalist fiction, the philosophy of conversation and musicology. Its contributors argue that across these fields, the central philosophical conundrums of the era were reflected, and sometimes transformed, in surprising ways.
This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a ... more This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a variety of people in diverse kinds of relationships. It engages with the recent resurgence of interest in the history of exploration by focusing on the various indigenous intermediaries – Jacky Jacky, Bungaree, Moowattin, Tupaia, Mai, Cheealthluc and lesser-known individuals – who were the guides, translators, and hosts that assisted and facilitated European travellers in exploring different parts of the world.
These intermediaries are rarely the authors of exploration narratives, or the main focus within exploration archives. Nonetheless the archives of exploration contain imprints of their presence, experience and contributions. The chapters present a range of ways of reading archives to bring them to the fore. The contributors ask new questions of existing materials, suggest new interpretive approaches, and present innovative ways to enhance sources so as to generate new stories.
This is the first historical study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Using the reactions of e... more This is the first historical study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Using the reactions of eighteenth-century western explorers to Aboriginal men, Konishi argues that these encounters were not as negative as has been thought. Instead, a wide range of contemporary sources from colonial explorers is used to present a more nuanced view. Ideas about human difference, nature, ‘savagery’, sexuality, language and conflict are analysed and assessed. By examining the response to the Aboriginal body within these contexts, Konishi makes a significant contribution to the study of eighteenth-century European thought.
Papers by Shino Konishi
in P. Cane, L. Ford and M. McMillan (eds), The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, CUP, Melbourne, 2022
This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad s... more This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad settler and Australian legal histories that have shaped their lives and histories since colonisation. I argue that we still need to reckon with law because settler law denied Aboriginal land title and continues to deny Aboriginal sovereignty. Tracing settler laws’ complicity with the colonial project, this chapter first examines how the fantasy of terra nullius was instantiated through laws which enabled the expropriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lands and waters. It then examines how First Nations people have been unduly affected by separate, discriminatory settler laws which governed almost all facets of their lives. Yet, Australia’s legal system to redress these injustices, constitutes new and evolving chapters in the nation’s legal history.
in Victoria Stead and Jon Altman (eds), Labour Lines: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Experiences of Labour Mobility in Australia, ANU Press, Canberra., 2019
in Tiina Äikäs and Anna-Kaisa Salmi (eds), The Sound of Silence: Indigenous Perspectives on the Historical Archaeology of Colonialism, New York, Berghahn Books., 2019
Journal of Australian Studies, 2020
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2020
This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial sc... more This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial schemes and fashioned himself as an emigration expert. In 1848 he published Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to 1847, followed by a number of emigrant guides to the individual Australian colonies, the Cape of Good Hope and Port Natal. Descriptions of indigenous peoples proliferate throughout Byrne’s guides. While his texts were informed by his own travels, he also quoted liberally from official correspondence, newspapers, and other contemporary works. His accounts reflect both his own opinions, and also a broad spectrum of imperial attitudes and approaches towards Indigenous peoples. This article explores Byrne’s ideas of how Indigenous peoples might best serve the interest of British emigrants: that is how they might or might not be made ‘useful’ to British subjects, and also, in some cases, how their inevitable demise would provide ‘peculiar advantages to emigrants’. His accounts of Indigenous people illustrate the problems posed by the ‘native question’ in imperial thinking, and the way in which Britain grappled to envisage the future place of indigenous people within its colonies in the face of growing settler demands for land.
Kate Fullagar and Michael McDonnell (eds), Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, 2018
'True Biographies of Nations?' The Cultural Journeys of Dictionaries of National Biography, Karen Fox (ed.), 2019
An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) is a new Australian Research Council-fund... more An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) is a new Australian Research Council-funded research project I am leading with Malcolm Allbrook and Tom Griffiths, which seeks to redress the long-standing underrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) by doubling the number of Indigenous biographies within the online ADB, and producing a stand-alone published volume of Indigenous short biographies. Yet, rather than just producing 190 new entries, our aim is also to rethink how Indigenous biographies can be conceptualised, being attentive to how and why Indigenous biography is distinctive, and how Indigenous people, who have long been marginalised and excluded from the national imaginary, can now be better accommodated with the ADB, and hence be better incorporated within the national story.
Australian Historical Studies, 2019
Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to inter... more Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to interpret the colonial cultures and histories of former British colonies where Indigenous people have since become a marginalised minority in their own homelands, ‘replaced’ by European settlers who sought to ‘eliminate’ them and their connections to the land. Yet, in recent years this approach has been subject to more critical evaluations, key amongst them, by some First Nations scholars. In this article I explore how Indigenous scholars advocate, interrogate, critique or challenge settler colonial studies as an emerging field of enquiry. I conclude by discussing Indigenous-authored extra-colonial histories, which bypass colonial expropriation and exploitation to focus on Indigenous worlds.
Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2015
This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the histo... more This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the history of cross-cultural encounters. Rather than focusing on face-to-face interactions, it examines how emotions governed European engagements with Aboriginal cultural landscapes and shaped Europeans' imaginings of how places could be constituted as sacred. It looks specifically at the writings of François Péron, one of the scientific crew of the Baudin expedition, a French Revolutionary voyage that visited Australia and Timor between 1801 and 1803. During the explora tion of Australia the French expedition discovered two Aboriginal places that were interpreted as religiously significant to the local people: a grove discovered at Geographe Bay in the southwest of Australia and two tombs found at Maria Island off the southeast of Tasmania. Péron's extended discussion of these Aboriginal sites highlights the significance of emotions in the construction of ethnographic accounts, as well as the role of emotions in transcultural perceptions of place.
In Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista (eds), 'Indigenous Convers... more In Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista (eds), 'Indigenous Conversations about Biography', special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, Summer 2016, pp. 410-428.
In Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (eds), Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspect... more In Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (eds), Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives, ANU Press, Canberra, 2015.
in Rachel Standfield (ed.), Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ANU Press, Ca... more in Rachel Standfield (ed.), Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ANU Press, Canberra, 2018.
In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries:... more In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, 2016
In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries:... more In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
This book is a biographical history of Rottnest Island, a small carceral island offshore from Wes... more This book is a biographical history of Rottnest Island, a small carceral island offshore from Western Australia. Rottnest is also known as Wadjemup, or "the place across the water where the spirits are", by Noongar, the Indigenous people of south-western Australia.
Through a series of biographical case studies of the diverse individuals connected to the island, the book argues that their particular histories lend Rottnest Island a unique heritage in which Indigenous, maritime, imperial, colonial, penal, and military histories intersect with histories of leisure and recreation. Tracing the way in which Wadjemup/Rottnest Island has been continually re-imagined and re-purposed throughout its history, the text explores the island’s carceral history, which has left behind it a painful community memory.
Today it is best known as a beach holiday destination, a reputation bolstered by the "quokka selfie" trend, the online posting of photographs taken with the island’s cute native marsupial. This book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in Australian history, Aboriginal history, and the history of the British Empire, especially those interested in the burgeoning scholarship on the concept of "carceral archipelagos" and island prisons.
ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned whith what it meant to be huma... more The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned whith what it meant to be human. This was due at least in part to the increasing awareness of human diversity brought by exploration and travel to new domains.
This collection of essays traces the concept of "humanity" through revolutionary politics, feminist biography, portraiture, explorer narratives, libertine and Orientalist fiction, the philosophy of conversation and musicology. Its contributors argue that across these fields, the central philosophical conundrums of the era were reflected, and sometimes transformed, in surprising ways.
This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a ... more This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a variety of people in diverse kinds of relationships. It engages with the recent resurgence of interest in the history of exploration by focusing on the various indigenous intermediaries – Jacky Jacky, Bungaree, Moowattin, Tupaia, Mai, Cheealthluc and lesser-known individuals – who were the guides, translators, and hosts that assisted and facilitated European travellers in exploring different parts of the world.
These intermediaries are rarely the authors of exploration narratives, or the main focus within exploration archives. Nonetheless the archives of exploration contain imprints of their presence, experience and contributions. The chapters present a range of ways of reading archives to bring them to the fore. The contributors ask new questions of existing materials, suggest new interpretive approaches, and present innovative ways to enhance sources so as to generate new stories.
This is the first historical study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Using the reactions of e... more This is the first historical study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Using the reactions of eighteenth-century western explorers to Aboriginal men, Konishi argues that these encounters were not as negative as has been thought. Instead, a wide range of contemporary sources from colonial explorers is used to present a more nuanced view. Ideas about human difference, nature, ‘savagery’, sexuality, language and conflict are analysed and assessed. By examining the response to the Aboriginal body within these contexts, Konishi makes a significant contribution to the study of eighteenth-century European thought.
in P. Cane, L. Ford and M. McMillan (eds), The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, CUP, Melbourne, 2022
This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad s... more This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad settler and Australian legal histories that have shaped their lives and histories since colonisation. I argue that we still need to reckon with law because settler law denied Aboriginal land title and continues to deny Aboriginal sovereignty. Tracing settler laws’ complicity with the colonial project, this chapter first examines how the fantasy of terra nullius was instantiated through laws which enabled the expropriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lands and waters. It then examines how First Nations people have been unduly affected by separate, discriminatory settler laws which governed almost all facets of their lives. Yet, Australia’s legal system to redress these injustices, constitutes new and evolving chapters in the nation’s legal history.
in Victoria Stead and Jon Altman (eds), Labour Lines: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Experiences of Labour Mobility in Australia, ANU Press, Canberra., 2019
in Tiina Äikäs and Anna-Kaisa Salmi (eds), The Sound of Silence: Indigenous Perspectives on the Historical Archaeology of Colonialism, New York, Berghahn Books., 2019
Journal of Australian Studies, 2020
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2020
This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial sc... more This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial schemes and fashioned himself as an emigration expert. In 1848 he published Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to 1847, followed by a number of emigrant guides to the individual Australian colonies, the Cape of Good Hope and Port Natal. Descriptions of indigenous peoples proliferate throughout Byrne’s guides. While his texts were informed by his own travels, he also quoted liberally from official correspondence, newspapers, and other contemporary works. His accounts reflect both his own opinions, and also a broad spectrum of imperial attitudes and approaches towards Indigenous peoples. This article explores Byrne’s ideas of how Indigenous peoples might best serve the interest of British emigrants: that is how they might or might not be made ‘useful’ to British subjects, and also, in some cases, how their inevitable demise would provide ‘peculiar advantages to emigrants’. His accounts of Indigenous people illustrate the problems posed by the ‘native question’ in imperial thinking, and the way in which Britain grappled to envisage the future place of indigenous people within its colonies in the face of growing settler demands for land.
Kate Fullagar and Michael McDonnell (eds), Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, 2018
'True Biographies of Nations?' The Cultural Journeys of Dictionaries of National Biography, Karen Fox (ed.), 2019
An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) is a new Australian Research Council-fund... more An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) is a new Australian Research Council-funded research project I am leading with Malcolm Allbrook and Tom Griffiths, which seeks to redress the long-standing underrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) by doubling the number of Indigenous biographies within the online ADB, and producing a stand-alone published volume of Indigenous short biographies. Yet, rather than just producing 190 new entries, our aim is also to rethink how Indigenous biographies can be conceptualised, being attentive to how and why Indigenous biography is distinctive, and how Indigenous people, who have long been marginalised and excluded from the national imaginary, can now be better accommodated with the ADB, and hence be better incorporated within the national story.
Australian Historical Studies, 2019
Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to inter... more Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to interpret the colonial cultures and histories of former British colonies where Indigenous people have since become a marginalised minority in their own homelands, ‘replaced’ by European settlers who sought to ‘eliminate’ them and their connections to the land. Yet, in recent years this approach has been subject to more critical evaluations, key amongst them, by some First Nations scholars. In this article I explore how Indigenous scholars advocate, interrogate, critique or challenge settler colonial studies as an emerging field of enquiry. I conclude by discussing Indigenous-authored extra-colonial histories, which bypass colonial expropriation and exploitation to focus on Indigenous worlds.
Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2015
This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the histo... more This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the history of cross-cultural encounters. Rather than focusing on face-to-face interactions, it examines how emotions governed European engagements with Aboriginal cultural landscapes and shaped Europeans' imaginings of how places could be constituted as sacred. It looks specifically at the writings of François Péron, one of the scientific crew of the Baudin expedition, a French Revolutionary voyage that visited Australia and Timor between 1801 and 1803. During the explora tion of Australia the French expedition discovered two Aboriginal places that were interpreted as religiously significant to the local people: a grove discovered at Geographe Bay in the southwest of Australia and two tombs found at Maria Island off the southeast of Tasmania. Péron's extended discussion of these Aboriginal sites highlights the significance of emotions in the construction of ethnographic accounts, as well as the role of emotions in transcultural perceptions of place.
In Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista (eds), 'Indigenous Convers... more In Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista (eds), 'Indigenous Conversations about Biography', special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, Summer 2016, pp. 410-428.
In Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (eds), Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspect... more In Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (eds), Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives, ANU Press, Canberra, 2015.
in Rachel Standfield (ed.), Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ANU Press, Ca... more in Rachel Standfield (ed.), Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ANU Press, Canberra, 2018.
In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries:... more In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, 2016
In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries:... more In Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (eds), Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, ANU Press, Canberra, 2016.
In 1995 Ann Curthoys and Clive Moore published “Working for the White People”, a key essay on Ind... more In 1995 Ann Curthoys and Clive Moore published “Working for the White People”, a key essay on Indigenous labour historiography. They called for scholars to consider the history of Indigenous people's experience of work in terms of labour and not race relations. In this special issue devoted to celebrating Ann Curthoys' career, we take up the challenge by writing a history of the Torres Strait Islanders who moved to the mainland to work on the construction of the railways to service the burgeoning mining industry in the 1960s, a period commemorated in Islander communities as “railway time”. In our study of Indigenous labour and mobility we focus on the experiences of a particular Islander man, John Culear Kennell Snr, who worked as a labourer, team leader and recruiter of other Islanders in Queensland and Western Australia.
John West Sooby (ed.), Discovery and Empire: the French in the South Seas, University of Adelaide Press, 2013
who penned the ethnographic instructions that were adopted for the Baudin expedition's voyage to ... more who penned the ethnographic instructions that were adopted for the Baudin expedition's voyage to the South Seas, advised French naturalists and scientific travellers to investigate the "senses of the Savage". 2 He urged them to ascertain which senses native peoples most frequently called upon and what circumstances influenced their development. These instructions also requested explorers to compare indigenous people's faculties of sense to those of the Europeans, and to determine to "what class and species of sensation do they attach most pleasure?" Degérando even proposed a methodology, which Baudin and his men were rarely if ever in the position to carry out. He suggested that the ethnographer should judge each particular sense against the following criteria:
Transgressions: critical Australian Indigenous …, Jan 1, 2007
François Péron was my first. A slight man with a sickly aspect, blind in one eye and possessing a... more François Péron was my first. A slight man with a sickly aspect, blind in one eye and possessing a long patrician nose that gave him an imperious air, 1 he had a tendency to be self-indulgent, was intensely political in his relationships, and was not averse to machination against anyone he developed a dislike for. He could easily tell the odd lie or bend the truth if he saw any benefit to himself in it. He certainly could not be accused of mincing his words. His dedication to self-justification and self-aggrandising was exasperating to say the least.