Book Launches

Launch of The City’s Outback by Gillian Cowlishaw

On the 13th of March, at that hub of inner Sydney intellectual life, Gleebooks, a former Professor of the Department of Anthropology, Ghassan Hage, launched a book written by Honorary Associate and former staff member, Professor Gillian Cowlishaw.

The book, ‘The City’s Outback’ (UNSW Press) is a diary like account of doing ethnographic research among the disavowed offspring of Sydney city, the western suburbs resident. Here is some of what Ghassan had to say:

Cowlishaw offers the reader a portrait of her encounter as an anthropologist with what she calls ‘everyday Aboriginality’. It is nothing short of a challenging invitation to enter our Aboriginal social unconscious with all the emotions, uncertainties, ambivalences, limitations, but also rewards, that such a difficult encounter generates. What makes the trip less daunting but perhaps more alluring is that Cowlishaw gets the help of some Mt Druitt Aboriginal insiders who also help us along the way with their reported commentary. …
       It is a book that you must, absolutely must, read; a book that you must also make your friends, your family members and your neighbours read; those who are interested in Aboriginal Australia and those who aren’t but ought to be. …
The book also offers all of us, non-Aboriginal people, an ethics: a mode of approaching and interacting with Aboriginal people and Aboriginal issues while minimizing the chances of falling into the many pitfalls of everyday white discourse ‘about’ them, whether of the racist or the ‘well-meaning’ variety. Indeed, because it is constantly aiming to avoid these pitfalls, there is a considerable degree of anxiety that pervades the book. It is a healthy kind of anxiety that comes, first, from a constant and relentless questioning of one’s right as a non-Aboriginal person to record and examine the lives of Aboriginal people. It is also an anxiety that emanates from a constant desire to avoid rushing to conclusions, to glorify or disparage. .. But most of all an anxiety to do justice to the lives that are unfolding before our eyes by taking them as they present themselves …
       This capacity to open oneself to otherness in all its uncertainty without a desire to fix its meaning and domesticate it is what Keats has called ‘negative capability’. It is what the best ethnographers should always have. If I reveal a bias in recommending this book so highly, it is probably here that my bias lies. By reading Cowlishaw I glimpse the possibility of a vigorous, redeemed and intelligent ethnography of the kind that only anthropologists can do…
       One feels that almost in an unconscious mode of adapting to her subject she develops a mode of writing that moves along its escaping subject. Her work ends up coming across as ethnography with rather than about Aboriginal people. Here method and ethics fuse. To do an ‘ethnography about’ is often about ‘capturing’ and ‘fixing’ people in order to portray them in an understandable way. But to write an ‘ethnography with’ is more than to give up on the idea of capturing and to accompany the flow. To ‘write with’ is also to give force, to empower and to propel. It is to offer in one’s writing a mode of ‘accompanying’, strengthening and infusing life in those one is writing about. It is to ‘be with’ in Heidegger’s sense of Mit Dasein. It is like walking a dog in the park where the bounciness of the dog is transmitted to us. We can say that the dog is walking ‘with us’ in that strong sense when its bounciness infuses life in us making us feel equally bouncy. To ‘write with’ is to offer a writing that provides such bounciness.

Frank Doolan, the main character in The City’s Outback, also spoke, both moving and amusing the audience. He told a story from Mt. Druitt about a young boy’s memory of being rescued by his South African neighbours from their backyard swimming pool. Franks also said the book was great, adding ironically, ‘but I would say that wouldn’t I’, thus ending a triumphant evening on a suitably modest note.

Launch of An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, edited by Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett

In December 2008 at the ASA/AAS/ASAANZ conference in Auckland Professor Marilyn Strathern launched An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, edited by Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett (Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra).

WEH Stanner was an anthropologist whose influence reached beyond the walls of the academy. He worked with Aboriginal people in north Australia from the 1930s and is best known for his acclaimed 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming. Across his career Stanner worked to cultivate public understanding of the richness of Aboriginal culture and cosmology, and urged greater recognition and respect for Aboriginal people in Australian society. More than twenty years after his death, Stanner’s writings continue to command attention in the vexed arena of Aboriginal affairs.

An Appreciation of Difference arises out of a conference celebrating the centenary of Stanner’s birth organised by the editors in 2005. It brings together leading scholars working in Aboriginal Australia to consider Stanner’s legacy in the present and to provide contextual understandings of his contributions to anthropological scholarship, Australian public culture and policy making.

Themes explored include the rich complexity of Aboriginal religion, the development dilemmas of Aboriginal Australia and those of post-war Africa and the Pacific; contestation over land rights and the place of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation, and the creative concerns of life writing.

Launching the book Marilyn Strathern described An Appreciation of Difference as a ‘fascinating and important collection’.

Reviewing the collection in The Monthly, Inga Clendinnen reflected that it ‘raises in poignant form the question of how we can best grasp an individual life history… It offers a magnificent array of information, insights, analyses, evaluations: multiple takes on a multiple man. But be warned. If you pick it up it will eat at least a month of your life’.