Mawul Rom Project: openness, obligation and reconciliation.
Abstract: Aboriginal Australian initiatives to restore balanced relationships with White Australians have recently become part of reconciliation efforts. This paper provides a contextualised report on one such initiative, the Mawul Rom cross-cultural mediation project. Viewing Mawul Rom as a diplomatic venture in the lineage of adjustment and earlier Rom...

Modelling costs of dementia in Australia: evidence, gaps, and needs.
Abstract With the rapid ageing of the Australian population, dementia has emerged as a major health and economic challenge. Consensus exists that the number of people with dementia will grow significantly because the prevalence is strongly correlated with age. However, there are substantial gaps in our understanding...

Kimberley friction: complex attachments to water-places in Northern Australia.
This article explores water as central to defining complex attachments to place, an approach that is concerned to contribute to discussion beyond water's conceptualisation as a vital and natural resource in need of environmental management. The value of an active discourse and practice that emphasises water as a resource...

Musical and linguistic perspectives on Aboriginal song.
In the period from 1984 to the present, numerous collections of essays dedicated entirely or partly to Aboriginal song and dance have appeared. (1) Each of these represented a response to particular stimuli. Three publications, Songs of Aboriginal Australia, The Politics of Dance and Landscapes of Indigenous Performance grew...

The poetics of central Australian song.
Abstract: An often cited feature of traditional songs from Central Australia (CA songs) is the obfuscation of meaning. This arises partly from the difficulties of translation and partly from the difficulties in identifying words in song. The latter is the subject of this paper, where I argue it is...

Iwaidja Jurtbirrk songs: bringing language and music together.
Abstract: Song brings language and music together. Great singers are at once musicians and wordsmiths, who toss rhythm, melody and word against one another in complex cross-play. In this paper we outline some initial findings that are emerging from our interdisciplinary study of the musical traditions of the Cobourg...

Australian Aboriginal song language: so many questions, so little to work with.
Recent years have seen a significant upturn in research activity into Indigenous song language. We now have teams of researchers including anthropologists, linguists and musicologists engaged in longer-term song language projects. This paper seeks to outline that activity and suggest lines of inquiry for future research. To that end,...

Cannibalism: a white colonist fiction?
RECENTLY IN THE Weekend Australian Philip Jones, a distinguished scholar and curator at the Adelaide Museum, deplored Daisy Bates' "insistence on the prevalence of cannibalism in Aboriginal society". He claimed that she "conflated Aboriginal hearsay about cannibalism and mythological accounts". It is hard to fathom why Jones should have...

Landscapes of Indigenous Performance: Music, song and dance of the Torres Strait and Arnhem Land.
Landscapes of Indigenous Performance: Music, song and dance of the Torres Strait and Arnhem Land Fiona Magowan and Karl Neuenfeldt (editors) 2005 Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, vii+171 pp, ISBN 987 0 85575 493 8 There are different ways of understanding a per-formance. One...

The intensity of raw material utilisation as an indication of occupational history in surface stone artefact assemblages from the Strathbogie Ranges, central Victoria.
Abstract: Stone artefact assemblages are a major source of information on past human-landscape relationships throughout much of Australia. These relationships are not well understood in the Strathbogie Ranges of central Victoria, where few detailed analyses of stone artefact assemblages have been undertaken. The purpose of this paper is to...