Fellow and Deputy Director

Australian Centre for Indigenous History

Qualifications
BA (Hons & University Medal) Sydney

PhD Sydney

Biography and Interests
I joined the Australian Centre for Indigenous History as a research fellow in August 2008. Previously I was a research fellow at the National Museum of Australia's Centre for Historical Research and a lecturer at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. In 1998 I received the inaugural New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Indigenous History Fellowship. I am the editor of Aboriginal History journal. I am also a member of the ARC National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network.

My research broadly investigates Western representations of Aboriginal people and culture. I am especially interested in the history of cross-cultural encounters between Aboriginal people and European explorers and travellers, as well as historic and contemporary depictions of Indigenous bodies and gender relations. I am of Aboriginal descent and identify with the Yawuru people of Broome, Western Australia.

Current Research Projects

I am currently working on three different research projects. The first, Through Travellers’ Eyes: Foreign Observations of Aboriginal People and British Colonisation, 1800-1850, examines encounters between travellers and Aboriginal people throughout Australia in the first half of the nineteenth century. I am also working with Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam on another project, Exploring the Middle Ground: New Histories of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australian Maritime and Land Exploration. This examines the history of Australian exploration through the lens of cross-cultural encounters and relations, with the aim of bringing to the fore the experience of Aboriginal people who came into contact with explorers. A third project, Deepening Histories of Place: Exploring indigenous landscapes of national and international significance, with Ann McGrath, Peter Read, Luke Taylor and Denis Byrne, examines Indigenous histories of place in New South Wales and the Northern Territory.

Courses Taught
HIST 2022/6022: Indigenous Australian History

HIST2231/6231: Exploration: From Columbus to the Moon

Selected Publications

Books

The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2012, 254pp.

With Alexander Cook and Ned Curthoys (eds), Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2013, 237pp.

Journal Special Issues

With Maria Nugent (eds), ‘Baz Luhrmann’s Australia Reviewed’, special issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema, Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2010.

With Leah Lui-Chivizhe and Lisa Slater (eds), ‘Indigenous Bodies’, special issue of Borderlands E-journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008.

Book Chapters and Journal Articles

‘Discovering the Savage Senses: French and British explorers’ encounters with Aboriginal people’, in John West-Sooby (ed), Discovery and Empire, University of Adelaide Press, Adelaide, 2013 (forthcoming).

‘François Péron’s Mediation on Death, Humanity and Savage Society’, in Alexander Cook, Ned Curthoys and Shino Konishi (eds), Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2013, pp. 109-22.

With Alexander Cook and Ned Curthoys, ‘The Science and Politics of Humanity in the Eighteenth Century: An Introduction’, in A. Cook, N. Curthoys and S. Konishi (eds), Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2013, pp. 1-14.

With Maria Nugent, ‘Newcomers, c. 1600-1800’, in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (eds), Cambridge History of Australia, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2013, vol. 1, pp. 43-67.

‘Representing Aboriginal Masculinity in Howard’s Australia’, in Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji (eds), Global Masculinities and Manhood, University of Illinois Press, 2011, pp. 161-185.

‘The Four Fathers of Australia: Baz Luhrmann’s depiction of Aboriginal history and paternity in the Northern Territory’, in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds), History in Popular Culture, special issue of History Australia, Vol. 8, No. 1, April 2011, 23-41.

‘Idle men: the eighteenth-century roots of the Indigenous indolence myth’, in Ann Curthoys, Frances Peters-Little and John Docker (eds), Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Histories, Aboriginal History Monographs No 23, ANU E-Press, Canberra, 2010, 99-122.

‘Rainbow Serpent’, in Richard White and Melissa Harper (eds) Symbols of Australia, UNSW Press, 2010, 201-205.

With Lisa Slater and Leah Lui-Chivizhe, ‘Indigenous Bodies’, in Shino Konishi, Leah Lui-Chivizhe and Lisa Slater (eds), Indigenous Bodies, special edition of Borderlands E-journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008.

‘“tied in rolled knots and powdered with ochre”: Aboriginal hair and eighteenth-century cross-cultural encounters’, in Shino Konishi, Leah Lui-Chivizhe and Lisa Slater (eds), Indigenous Bodies, special edition of Borderlands E-journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008.

‘“Wanton with plenty”: Questioning ethno-historical constructions of sexual savagery in Aboriginal societies’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2008, 356 - 372.

‘“Inhabited by a race of formidable giants”: French explorers, Aborigines, and the endurance of the fantastic in the Great South Land, 1803’, Australian Humanities Review, Iss. 44, April 2008, 7-22.

‘The Father Governor: The British Administration of Aboriginal People at Port Jackson, 1788-1792’, in Matthew McCormack (ed.) Public Men: Political Masculinities in Modern Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2007, 54-72.

‘François Péron and the Tasmanians: an unrequited romance’, in Mark Hannah and Ingereth Macfarlane (eds), Transgressions: critical Australian Indigenous histories, Aboriginal History monograph 16, ANU e-Press, 2007, 1-18.

‘Depicting sexuality: a case study on the Baudin expedition's Aboriginal ethnography’, Australian Journal of French Studies, Vol. XLI, No. 2, 2004, 98-116.

‘The tantalising cannibal: rationalising anthropophagy in the long eighteenth century’, Signatures, Vol. 5, Summer 2002, [online].

Recent Research Grants

Exploring the Middle Ground: New Histories of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australian Maritime and Land Exploration, ARC Discovery, CIs: Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam, 2011-2013.

Through Travellers’ Eyes: Foreign Observations of Aboriginal People and British Colonisation, 1800-1850, ARC DIRD, CI: Shino Konishi, 2010-2012.

Deepening Histories of Place: Exploring indigenous landscapes of national and international significance, ARC Linkage, CIs: Ann McGrath, Shino Konishi, Peter Read, Luke Taylor, 2010-2012.