Professor Gillian Cowlishaw

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I had travelled, married and was a mother before coming to Sydney University in the 1970s and taking a PhD in anthropology. I taught at Charles Sturt University, the ANU, and Sydney University.
My first research in southern Arnhem Land in 1975 and 1976 later led to the publication of a historical ethnography of the remote community of Bulman: Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: racial power and intimacy in north Australia. (Allen and Unwin with Michigan University Press 1999). Between the first field work and that book I became interested in NSW Aboriginal communities and my first and third books were based on research in the notorious country town of Bourke. These were Black, White or Brindle (Cambridge University Press 1988) and Blackfellas, whitefellas and the hidden injuries of race(Blackwell 2004). Most of my published work is based on interpreting ethnographic accounts of the relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians in contemporary Australia and in the past. Thus I have developed frameworks for understanding racial and cultural identities and their interactions and transformations.
Since 1990 I have been conducting field work in western Sydney

Selected Books

1997 Edited with Dr. B. Morris Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ society. Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press.

1999 Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: racial power and intimacy in north Australia. Sydney and Michigan. Allen and Unwin with Michigan University Press.

2004 Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

2006 Co-editor. Moving Anthropology: critical Indigenous Studies Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press. (with T. Lea and E. Kowal).

2009 The City’s Outback. Sydney, UNSW Press

Recent Articles

2000 Censoring Race in post-colonial anthropology. Critique of Anthropology. London. Vol 20 (2): 101-123

2000 Black modernity and bureaucratic culture. Aboriginal Studies Journal Canberra.

2001 ‘Performing Aboriginality: The politics and poetics of citizenship in everyday life’ : UTS Review Vol 7 (1).

2003 ‘Disappointing Indigenous People’ Public Culture Vol 15(1): 103-125

2003 ‘Euphemism, Banality, Propaganda: Anthropology, public debate and Indigenous communities’ Australian Aboriginal Studies (1): 2-18