Tim Rowse

Tim Rowse holds honorary positions at Western Sydney University and the Australian National University His books include Indigenous and Other Australians Since 1901 (UNSW Press, 2017) and (co-edited with Lawrence Bamblett and Fred Myers) The Difference Identity Makes (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019).

Tim Rowse reviews 'Take this child ... from Kahlin Compound to the Retta Dixon Children's Home' by Barbara Cummings

February–March 1991, no. 128 • 01 February 1991

Barbara Cummings’s history combines archival research, interviews with her peers, and autobiography to declare the common experiences of an Aboriginal subculture, the ex-inmates of the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin. She deems it ‘a first step in our healing process’. It is also an outstanding contribution to feminist and Aboriginal history. ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'Mining and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia' by J. Connell and R. Howitt (eds.), and 'Aborigines and Diamond Mining: the politics of resource development in the East Kimberley Western Australia' by R.A. Dixon and M.C. Dillon (eds.

September 1992, no. 144 • 01 September 1992

If John Hewson leads the next Australian government, we are likely to see a reversal of the current government ban on mining at Coronation Hill and the lifting of other impediments to mining. Should the fight to preserve an indigenous right to negotiate other’s access to mineralised lands have to be renewed, these two books will make invaluable background reading. They document the awesome polit ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge' by Howard Morphy

December 1992, no. 147 • 01 December 1992

Morphy’s monograph is an instance of a problem in anthropological writing about Australian Aboriginal people, a problem of audiences. The public this book will reach (and please and enrich enormously) is international, made up of several thousand mostly Anglophone anthropologists students of art, particularly those researching or teaching about the contexts in which the art of non-Western people ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'Room for Manoeuvre: Writings on history, politics, ideas and play' selected and edited by Leonie Sandercock and Stephen Murray-Smith

August 1982, no. 43 • 01 August 1982

A joke told annually and publicly for fourteen years closes this collection of Ian Turner’s work. From 1965 to 1978, Turner delivered the Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture and so created the site of an imagined overlap between the more formal rituals of the intellectual culture and the rowdy world of spectatordom, the VFL, the most visible and familiar self-presentation of the popular. He fabricated ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'Hidden Histories: Black stories from the Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill stations' by Deborah Bird Rose

September 1991, no. 134 • 05 March 2020

If the stories brought together in this book had been arranged according to a chronological narrative, it would go something like this: Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Aboriginal people in what would later be called the Victoria River country (Northern Territory) were affected by a new disease, smallpox, which came from the north; many succumbed to its hideous embrace. Possibly, th ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'Chifley' by David Day

December 2001–January 2002, no. 237 • 01 December 2001

Joseph Benedict Chifley enjoys a special place in the Australian pantheon – an icon of decencies almost extinct. Born in 1885, Chifley was raised in Bathurst, where he joined the NSW Railways in 1903. One of the youngest-ever first-class locomotive drivers at the age of twenty seven, Chifley was among those who struck for six weeks in 1917 against new management practices in the railways. They l ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'Upheaval: How nations cope with crisis and change' by Jared Diamond

Online Exclusives • 26 July 2019

Individuals have crises; dealing with them sometimes makes a person stronger. Perhaps nation-states are similar: crises make them stronger and better. But is humanity as a whole like this? This question is raised but not answered in Jared Diamond’s Upheaval. Diamond sees four crises facing humans: the possibility of nuclear war killing millions and bringing ‘nuclear winter’; climate change; ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume one, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847' by Keith Windschuttle

February 2003, no. 248 • 01 February 2003

Keith Windschuttle seeks to undermine a ‘mindset’ among historians of Tasmania that started in Henry Melville’s History of Van Diemen’s Land (1835) and continues in Henry Reynolds’s An Indelible Stain (2001). Mindsets, or ‘interpretive frameworks’, sensitise historians to ‘evidence’ that fits their ‘assumptions’. While ‘often very productively’ applied, Windschuttle conce ... (read more)

Tim Rowse reviews 'The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom (2012 Boyer Lectures)' by Marcia Langton

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 25 June 2013

The Aborigines of Australia are among the more land-rich of colonised peoples. More than one fifth of Australia is under Aboriginal ownership, and a perpetual fund – established by Labor and fattened by Coalition and Labor governments – will add to this estate. To examine this recent change in Australian real estate as a ‘quiet revolution’ was a good choice of theme by Marcia Langton. ... (read more)