Stories from the Sandstone: Quarantine Inscriptions from Australia's Immigrant Past By Peter Hobbins, Ursula K. Frederick and Anne Clarke Arbon, Sydney, 2016 ISBN: 9780994310767. Pp. 304 AUD45(hardback) (original) (raw)

2017, Archaeology in Oceania

AsÅsa Ferrier notes at the very beginning of Chapter 1, historians have dominated research into interactions between Indigenous communities and European colonists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (p. 3). Yet the fact that the majority of utilised historical documents are written by those with European colonial origins has meant that Indigenous ways of life have often been seen as "passive" entities that are moulded by external economic, political, and cultural forces. While "contact" or "post-colonial" archaeologies have been developed to combat this-for example, in Australia-they have also tended to ignore potential transformations in the culture and subsistence of Indigenous groups both prior to, and following, European arrival, or they have generalised developmental trajectories for an entire landmass (p. 4). This book, however, provides an exemplary case study of how to combine archaeology, oral history and history, in a cultural-and regional-specific approach to archaeological studies of Indigenous-colonial interactions on the Evelyn Tableland, North Queensland. Ferrier's book puts this region and tropical rainforests, which have often been neglected in archaeological studies, on the global map of "contact" archaeology. The specific nature and title of this text may put some readers off, and the apparent division of the main body of the book into three site reports echoes a dissertation-like format. However, as one becomes immersed in the detail Ferrier marshals together from oral histories of Jirrbal members, interviews with twentieth century loggers, historical documents of European explorers and existing archaeological datasets for this region, one realises that a culture-, locale-specific approach is the only way to address the complex topic of Indigenous-European interactions. Indeed, by the end, this book has provided an intimate, well-structured "journey" through long-term changes in Aboriginal land use, culture and subsistence in the Queensland rainforest. The intimacy is increased by the fact that Ferrier draws heavily on discussions with Jirrbal elders, with whom she clearly became close friends, whose