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There are a number of avenues through which the ‘place’ of indigenous people in Australia can be approached. One fundamental arena of struggle has been over land rights. The approach to rights taken here, however, starts from an account of suffering and sets out to trace the political roots of that suffering. One of the clearest forms of suffering to mark the lives of Australian Aborigines is entrenched and widespread ill-health. This chapter considers some of the limitations of those dominant understandings of rights that mark both international rights promotion and the constitution of the liberal state. It asks how we understand and pursue principles of participation, dialogue and negotiation. Approaching health as a matter of human rights can be contentious. This chapter analyses the construction of the ‘Aboriginal problem’, the 1992 Australian High Court decision on Aboriginal land rights (known as the ‘Mabo decision’), Commonwealth indigenous health policy from the 1970s to the 2000s, and self-determination and citizenship.

This part begins by summarizing a foundational example of postcolonial film theory: “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction” by Robert Stam and Louise Spence. After generating some questions about sound tracks from this article, it then briefly surveys the history of marginalizing and demonizing Aborigines in Australian cinema. In this context, the sound tracks of two contemporary, independent Australian films—Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006)—are analyzed. Both of these films attempt to empower the voices of their main Aboriginal characters, thus “speaking back” to the national cinematic history that predates them. However, Ten Canoes emerges as the more radical of the two: where the world music, English-dominated dialogue, and sound effects of Rabbit-Proof Fence demand an emotional focus on its relatively quiet Aboriginal characters, the authentic Aboriginal music, and entirely Aboriginal language of Ten Canoes makes for a more extreme, and uncompromising introduction to traditional Indigenous life.

Repressed horror circulates in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in many forms, including domestic abuse, state violence, slavery, and cannibalism. This chapter analyzes fetishism, realism, metonymy, and violence in Great Expectations and argues that there is a particularly overwhelming horror that cannot be named but only encoded fetishistically in the most apparently negligible of details. The “negligible” (uninterpretable, insignificant, non-symbolic) detail on which this chapter focuses is “Negro head” tobacco; the horror in question is the genocide of Australian Aborigines during the Victorian period. Negro head tobacco conjures Abel Magwitch's identification of himself as a slave, specifically as the black slave of his erstwhile partner, Compeyson. In the second paragraph of Great Expectations, we find Pip trying to interpret a set of desperately unreaderly texts—the epitaphs on the gravestones of his dead family. He attempts to sketch for himself a portrait of his parents and brothers according to the “evidence” provided by the writing on their gravestones.

This chapter explores the confluence of sound recording, language, and digital technologies in Arnhem Land in Australia, owned by Aborigines, and examines how technologies for capturing sound have enabled the Australian Aborigines to keep their knowledge and traditions alive in spite of language loss. It also looks at how the indigenous peoples employed such technologies to “write” their stories even without inscribing them into a semiotic modality that sheds their fundamental oral qualities. The chapter demonstrates how media and digitization have made the voicing of Aboriginal languages possible.

This chapter examines the roles and musical behaviours in four very different types of hunting and gathering societies from around the world, including the Native Americans of the Plains, the Aka and Mbuti African Pygmies, the Pintupi-speaking Australian Aborigines, and the Arctic-dwelling Yupik of south-west Alaska and Inuit of Canada. It analyses the cross-cultural characteristics of musical activities and their uses and identifies the common features in the uses and nature of music in the four hunter-gatherer societies. It also describes the types of instruments used traditionally by these groups and the nature of the musical activities in which they are engaged.

This book's argument takes as its point of departure the question of how to promote human rights observance in international life. The whole complex business of international human rights promotion is not approached here as a particularly ‘innocent’ enterprise. The argument here proceeds from the understanding, or the presumption, that questions of human rights are also part of the much broader context of people's repeated efforts to work against the systemic infliction of suffering in political life and to create conditions of life that do not turn upon the generation of such suffering. Within international politics, and according to the Westphalian order, a distinction, indeed a complex opposition, is commonly drawn between the proper domain of politics and that of ethics, with human rights standardly classed with ethics. This book explores three case studies: the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, East Timor's violent modern history, and the health of Australian Aborigines.

Tooth ablation has a long history among Australian Aborigines. Here we present a study of four groups along a 370km stretch of the Murray River in southeastern Australia. The frequency and patterning are examined with respect to the individual’s sex, population, and tooth type. Within the study area, ablation is nine times more common among men than women (27 percent versus 5 percent). Although the samples are from cemeteries, there is no chronological control and from other evidence the remains probably date to the later Holocene. Larger regional linguistic and cultural groupings appear to be important indicators for ablation patterning, particularly differences between women upstream (7 percent) and downstream (absent). The tooth or teeth removed varies between groups and most combinations were seen, although ablation of a central incisor was the most common.

Schleiermacher offers an appealing account of religion in which it is not coercive but expressive, does not come into conflict with modern politics or science, and forms the most important and fulfilling part of each person’s identity. But when we look at Schleiermacher’s own efforts at comparative religion with this category at its base, troubles arise. At the same time that Schleiermacher was writing his famous Speeches on Religion he was writing a historical account of the British settlement of Australia, and engaging in an exchange of public letters about the emancipation of Jews in Prussia. If religion is what Schleiermacher says it is, these religions do not measure up very well. Religions in societies that do not foster expressive communication (Australia) and religions in which expressive communication have ossified into empty ritual (Judaism) rank much lower than Prussian Protestantism in Schleiermacher’s hierarchical taxonomy of religions.