Marcia Langton | University of Melbourne (original) (raw)
Papers by Marcia Langton
The Alcohol Management Plan at Pormpuraaw. An ethnographic community-based study, 2019
Alcohol is one of the leading causes of social, legal and health problems for Indigenous Australi... more Alcohol is one of the leading causes of social, legal and health problems for Indigenous Australians. Since 2002, Alcohol Management Plans (AMPs) have been used in many Indigenous communities as a framework to reduce alcohol-related harms. (Smith et al., 2013)
This report outlines the findings of an ethnographic research project which gathered and analysed the AMP in the remote Indigenous community of Pormpuraaw on the western coast of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland.
The qualitative and quantitative evidence examined in this project shows a significant reduction in alcohol-related harms following the introduction of the AMP.
We obtained data on hospital admissions which support the views of the majority of the Pormpuraaw community members who observed that violence and community disharmony reduced with the reductions in alcohol supply.
Musicology Australia 40(1):1-10 · August 2018, 2018
When new books are reviewed, they are normally in circulation and available for purchase. This is... more When new books are reviewed, they are normally in circulation and available for purchase. This is not true, however, of Deadly Woman Blues: Black Women & Australian Music by Clinton Walker, which was only recently released by NewSouth Publishing, the publish- ing arm of UNSW Press, in February 2018, yet withdrawn from sale within weeks due to numerous complaints from the very musicians whose work and achievements it sought to celebrate. Before reaching most bookstore shelves, Deadly Woman Blues was resoundingly condemned by several of the most prominent of those musicians via their social media posts, letters to the editor, and news commentaries. Criticized for the lack of consultation and consent sought by Walker from many of the living musicians it discussed, as well as for the many factual errors and historical distortions found within its pages, NewSouth Publishing (2018) announced that Deadly Woman Blues would be pulped on 5 March 2018 with all corrections to be posted on its website. Walker (2018b) issued his own apol- ogy, citing the book’s ‘errors of fact’, that same day.
Walker had conceived of Deadly Woman Blues as a generally-chronological biographical encyclopaedia aimed at recognizing the often-overlooked histories and achievements of black women in Australian music. Although not unproblematic, the book did not stop with entries on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians, but also extended to expatriate musicians of the African diaspora and Indigenous communities of other coun- tries. Even so, Deadly Woman Blues was promoted as a sequel to Walker’s earlier book, the highly-successful Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music (Walker 2000a), which had spawned a tie-in documentary film (Nehl 2000), two double-CD albums (Walker 2000b, 2015b) and a stage show (Walker 2016). Deadly Woman Blues would not, however, be received as the triumph that Buried Country had been.
Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 2018
This is an account of collaborating with Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula and, in tribute to him and his t... more This is an account of collaborating with Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula and, in tribute to him and his teaching and scholarship, a discussion of the methodological considerations for teaching and research-based teaching of Yolŋu culture. By privileging the agency and ontology of exegetes such as Gumbula and working in partnership, Yolŋu knowledge has become a part of the modern academic canon as well as a literary legacy for Yolŋu people. The invariable context of the scholarly encounter with Indigenous knowledge is an intercultural one attended by significant historical problems from experiences of the colonial and postcolonial capture of most indigenous societies in modern nation states. Indigenous exegetes hold knowledge systems that exist in situ, in places held in long traditions of customary land tenure and jural principles that predate colonial and postcolo-nial systems, and inherited in each generation by a few honoured and remarkable people who take up the arduous responsibility of learning and transmitting knowledge practices and their spoken, sung and performed vehicles of expression.
Journal of Material Culture
William Ricketts Sanctuary presents itself as a peaceful refuge in the forest-clad hills of the D... more William Ricketts Sanctuary presents itself as a peaceful refuge in the forest-clad hills of the Dandenong Ranges, on the outskirts Melbourne (Australia). Intertwined among the winding paths, 92 major and numerous minor clay sculptures of Aboriginal people and wildlife themes animate a vision of civil life with essential human spirituality, here captured as Aboriginal being. We explore in this article William Ricketts' imaginary Aboriginality-his clay-sculpted vision in intellectual, social and historical contexts.
Journal of Resource & Energy Law, 2008
Journal of Energy & Resource Law , 2008
Culture Crisis. Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, 2010
During the anthropological debate that followed the NT Intervention and the publication of Sutto... more During the anthropological debate that followed the NT Intervention and the publication of Sutton's book, two forces have become evident: the commitment of many anthropologists to a gerontocratic Aboriginal world which they encountered some decades ago during their young adulthood; and the shock of the new, that is, tradical he radical changes in the Aboriginal world, or the field where anthropologists gather their data, changes so radical that few anthropologists have adjusted intellectually to its challenges. The anthropology of the gerontocratic Aboriginal world of the past is of little relevance to the Aboriginal world in which a high proportion of the population consists of children or youth.
Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country , 2016
By the 1920s, it was well understood by missionaries, scientists and botanists that the spread of... more By the 1920s, it was well understood by missionaries, scientists and botanists that the spread of grazing and agriculture into the interior posed the final threat to the remaining Aboriginal populations. Botanists were also aware that Aboriginal economies were collapsing with the increasing competition for the plants which formed the staples of Aboriginal diet, and that the cattle herds were in large
part responsible for this economic disaster. This paper examines the work of these botanists for an ethnohistorical understanding of the demise of Aboriginal economic activities. Their records represents a rich record of the nature of the Aboriginal plant food economy and a window on the competition of the most educated colonists for the resources that would support ever-expanding herds of cattle and food for the colonists and the English market.
Postcolonial Studies, 2001
Historically, settler Australians have grappled with the problem of what to do about Aborigines. ... more Historically, settler Australians have grappled with the problem of what to do about Aborigines. There is a persistent unwillingness to acknowledge that, in Australia, the rights of Indigenous people are inferior to those in the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The modern nation constituted at Federation in 1901 excluded Indigenous people from the state; unable to hold citizenship in their own country until 1967, Aborigines inhabited a political no-man’s land for nearly seventy years. Since Federation, public debates about the place of Aboriginal people in the nation have focussed on the problem of how to incorporate Aboriginal people within the framework of the Australian nation- state by various means: assimilation, integration, self-management, self-determi- nation, reconciliation. Throughout the years, and throughout several of the shifts in government policies on ‘Aboriginal affairs’, the call for a treaty could also be heard.
The calls for a treaty go to the heart of the juridical denial, in Australian case law, of the existence of Aboriginal nations in Australia prior to the seizure of the land and consequent dispossession of Indigenous people by the British Crown. This denial has in effect accorded our nations the status of an anomaly among the settler colonial states. Unlike either Canada or New Zealand, as I show here, no treaties or agreements were concluded with Aboriginal people. The monstrous injustice of the seizure of and establishment of dominion over Aboriginal lands by the Crown, and the lack of agreements or treaties, remains a stain on Australian history and the chief obstacle to constructing an honourable place for Indigenous Australians in the modern nation-state. That place must now be found both through, and beyond, the limits of a legal discursive framework that de-humanises and de-historicises Aboriginal people
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/01/010013–14 Ó 2001 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/1368879012004684 3
The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2006
Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least ... more Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the ‘Croker Island case’) for several reasons. The applicant's native title was found to be non-exclusive of other interests, and a right to trade in resources of the sea was rejected. This case was argued in part by relying on historical material regarding Macassan trading arrangements. The profound alterity of Aboriginal relationships among persons and things, as the Croker Island evidence of property and trade relations demonstrates, have been re-constituted in legal discourse as an absence of economic relations. In this paper, we argue that there is no sound basis for the distinction made between commercial and non-commercial native title rights, whether in the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth of Australia), or in recent judicial reasoning. We contend that native title rights and interests constitute a sui generis species of property relations that enable economic rights as conceived in Aboriginal tradition and custom to circulate in the modern market. Aboriginal customary economic relations of and between Aboriginal groupings are markedly distinct from, yet not incommensurable with, the normative conception of economic relations in the Australian market. We argue that a reformulation of the current Australian legal ideas about economic life is necessary for the recognition of Aboriginal economic institutions in native title claims and other economic arenas.
Australian Indigenous Law Reporter , 2003
Talks by Marcia Langton
Entretien, 2000
Burning questions: shaping landscapes with aboriginal fire Interview with Professer Marcia Langto... more Burning questions:
shaping landscapes with aboriginal fire Interview with Professer Marcia Langton
By DOUGLAS NAKASHIMA
Books by Marcia Langton
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ABORIGINAL ART AND CULTURE , 2000
A history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmaking
Honour Among Nations? Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous People, 2004
Treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others during pre-colonial, colonial an... more Treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others during pre-colonial, colonial and modern times has, to varied extents, required the recognition of Indigenous customary polities. In this chapter we investigate some instances of treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others, with the purpose of discussing critically the modernday relevance of customary authority and legitimacy in modern Aboriginal political formations within the Australian nation-state. Some recent studies in history, and in legal and political thought apposite to the problem of contested sovereignty and governmental arrangements, have drawn our attention to inventive ways of considering colonial and postcolonial relationships and expressions of legitimate authority beyond the nineteenth-century confines of the nation-state doctrine.
Honour Among Nations? Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous People. Melbourne University Press, 2004
The Alcohol Management Plan at Pormpuraaw. An ethnographic community-based study, 2019
Alcohol is one of the leading causes of social, legal and health problems for Indigenous Australi... more Alcohol is one of the leading causes of social, legal and health problems for Indigenous Australians. Since 2002, Alcohol Management Plans (AMPs) have been used in many Indigenous communities as a framework to reduce alcohol-related harms. (Smith et al., 2013)
This report outlines the findings of an ethnographic research project which gathered and analysed the AMP in the remote Indigenous community of Pormpuraaw on the western coast of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland.
The qualitative and quantitative evidence examined in this project shows a significant reduction in alcohol-related harms following the introduction of the AMP.
We obtained data on hospital admissions which support the views of the majority of the Pormpuraaw community members who observed that violence and community disharmony reduced with the reductions in alcohol supply.
Musicology Australia 40(1):1-10 · August 2018, 2018
When new books are reviewed, they are normally in circulation and available for purchase. This is... more When new books are reviewed, they are normally in circulation and available for purchase. This is not true, however, of Deadly Woman Blues: Black Women & Australian Music by Clinton Walker, which was only recently released by NewSouth Publishing, the publish- ing arm of UNSW Press, in February 2018, yet withdrawn from sale within weeks due to numerous complaints from the very musicians whose work and achievements it sought to celebrate. Before reaching most bookstore shelves, Deadly Woman Blues was resoundingly condemned by several of the most prominent of those musicians via their social media posts, letters to the editor, and news commentaries. Criticized for the lack of consultation and consent sought by Walker from many of the living musicians it discussed, as well as for the many factual errors and historical distortions found within its pages, NewSouth Publishing (2018) announced that Deadly Woman Blues would be pulped on 5 March 2018 with all corrections to be posted on its website. Walker (2018b) issued his own apol- ogy, citing the book’s ‘errors of fact’, that same day.
Walker had conceived of Deadly Woman Blues as a generally-chronological biographical encyclopaedia aimed at recognizing the often-overlooked histories and achievements of black women in Australian music. Although not unproblematic, the book did not stop with entries on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians, but also extended to expatriate musicians of the African diaspora and Indigenous communities of other coun- tries. Even so, Deadly Woman Blues was promoted as a sequel to Walker’s earlier book, the highly-successful Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music (Walker 2000a), which had spawned a tie-in documentary film (Nehl 2000), two double-CD albums (Walker 2000b, 2015b) and a stage show (Walker 2016). Deadly Woman Blues would not, however, be received as the triumph that Buried Country had been.
Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 2018
This is an account of collaborating with Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula and, in tribute to him and his t... more This is an account of collaborating with Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula and, in tribute to him and his teaching and scholarship, a discussion of the methodological considerations for teaching and research-based teaching of Yolŋu culture. By privileging the agency and ontology of exegetes such as Gumbula and working in partnership, Yolŋu knowledge has become a part of the modern academic canon as well as a literary legacy for Yolŋu people. The invariable context of the scholarly encounter with Indigenous knowledge is an intercultural one attended by significant historical problems from experiences of the colonial and postcolonial capture of most indigenous societies in modern nation states. Indigenous exegetes hold knowledge systems that exist in situ, in places held in long traditions of customary land tenure and jural principles that predate colonial and postcolo-nial systems, and inherited in each generation by a few honoured and remarkable people who take up the arduous responsibility of learning and transmitting knowledge practices and their spoken, sung and performed vehicles of expression.
Journal of Material Culture
William Ricketts Sanctuary presents itself as a peaceful refuge in the forest-clad hills of the D... more William Ricketts Sanctuary presents itself as a peaceful refuge in the forest-clad hills of the Dandenong Ranges, on the outskirts Melbourne (Australia). Intertwined among the winding paths, 92 major and numerous minor clay sculptures of Aboriginal people and wildlife themes animate a vision of civil life with essential human spirituality, here captured as Aboriginal being. We explore in this article William Ricketts' imaginary Aboriginality-his clay-sculpted vision in intellectual, social and historical contexts.
Journal of Resource & Energy Law, 2008
Journal of Energy & Resource Law , 2008
Culture Crisis. Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, 2010
During the anthropological debate that followed the NT Intervention and the publication of Sutto... more During the anthropological debate that followed the NT Intervention and the publication of Sutton's book, two forces have become evident: the commitment of many anthropologists to a gerontocratic Aboriginal world which they encountered some decades ago during their young adulthood; and the shock of the new, that is, tradical he radical changes in the Aboriginal world, or the field where anthropologists gather their data, changes so radical that few anthropologists have adjusted intellectually to its challenges. The anthropology of the gerontocratic Aboriginal world of the past is of little relevance to the Aboriginal world in which a high proportion of the population consists of children or youth.
Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country , 2016
By the 1920s, it was well understood by missionaries, scientists and botanists that the spread of... more By the 1920s, it was well understood by missionaries, scientists and botanists that the spread of grazing and agriculture into the interior posed the final threat to the remaining Aboriginal populations. Botanists were also aware that Aboriginal economies were collapsing with the increasing competition for the plants which formed the staples of Aboriginal diet, and that the cattle herds were in large
part responsible for this economic disaster. This paper examines the work of these botanists for an ethnohistorical understanding of the demise of Aboriginal economic activities. Their records represents a rich record of the nature of the Aboriginal plant food economy and a window on the competition of the most educated colonists for the resources that would support ever-expanding herds of cattle and food for the colonists and the English market.
Postcolonial Studies, 2001
Historically, settler Australians have grappled with the problem of what to do about Aborigines. ... more Historically, settler Australians have grappled with the problem of what to do about Aborigines. There is a persistent unwillingness to acknowledge that, in Australia, the rights of Indigenous people are inferior to those in the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The modern nation constituted at Federation in 1901 excluded Indigenous people from the state; unable to hold citizenship in their own country until 1967, Aborigines inhabited a political no-man’s land for nearly seventy years. Since Federation, public debates about the place of Aboriginal people in the nation have focussed on the problem of how to incorporate Aboriginal people within the framework of the Australian nation- state by various means: assimilation, integration, self-management, self-determi- nation, reconciliation. Throughout the years, and throughout several of the shifts in government policies on ‘Aboriginal affairs’, the call for a treaty could also be heard.
The calls for a treaty go to the heart of the juridical denial, in Australian case law, of the existence of Aboriginal nations in Australia prior to the seizure of the land and consequent dispossession of Indigenous people by the British Crown. This denial has in effect accorded our nations the status of an anomaly among the settler colonial states. Unlike either Canada or New Zealand, as I show here, no treaties or agreements were concluded with Aboriginal people. The monstrous injustice of the seizure of and establishment of dominion over Aboriginal lands by the Crown, and the lack of agreements or treaties, remains a stain on Australian history and the chief obstacle to constructing an honourable place for Indigenous Australians in the modern nation-state. That place must now be found both through, and beyond, the limits of a legal discursive framework that de-humanises and de-historicises Aboriginal people
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/01/010013–14 Ó 2001 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/1368879012004684 3
The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2006
Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least ... more Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the ‘Croker Island case’) for several reasons. The applicant's native title was found to be non-exclusive of other interests, and a right to trade in resources of the sea was rejected. This case was argued in part by relying on historical material regarding Macassan trading arrangements. The profound alterity of Aboriginal relationships among persons and things, as the Croker Island evidence of property and trade relations demonstrates, have been re-constituted in legal discourse as an absence of economic relations. In this paper, we argue that there is no sound basis for the distinction made between commercial and non-commercial native title rights, whether in the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth of Australia), or in recent judicial reasoning. We contend that native title rights and interests constitute a sui generis species of property relations that enable economic rights as conceived in Aboriginal tradition and custom to circulate in the modern market. Aboriginal customary economic relations of and between Aboriginal groupings are markedly distinct from, yet not incommensurable with, the normative conception of economic relations in the Australian market. We argue that a reformulation of the current Australian legal ideas about economic life is necessary for the recognition of Aboriginal economic institutions in native title claims and other economic arenas.
Australian Indigenous Law Reporter , 2003
Entretien, 2000
Burning questions: shaping landscapes with aboriginal fire Interview with Professer Marcia Langto... more Burning questions:
shaping landscapes with aboriginal fire Interview with Professer Marcia Langton
By DOUGLAS NAKASHIMA
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ABORIGINAL ART AND CULTURE , 2000
A history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmaking
Honour Among Nations? Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous People, 2004
Treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others during pre-colonial, colonial an... more Treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others during pre-colonial, colonial and modern times has, to varied extents, required the recognition of Indigenous customary polities. In this chapter we investigate some instances of treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others, with the purpose of discussing critically the modernday relevance of customary authority and legitimacy in modern Aboriginal political formations within the Australian nation-state. Some recent studies in history, and in legal and political thought apposite to the problem of contested sovereignty and governmental arrangements, have drawn our attention to inventive ways of considering colonial and postcolonial relationships and expressions of legitimate authority beyond the nineteenth-century confines of the nation-state doctrine.
Honour Among Nations? Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous People. Melbourne University Press, 2004