White man got no dreaming : essays, 1938-1973

Thhe eighteen papers that make up this book were written as occasional piueces or as public lectures between 1938 and 1974. All of them have a (common theme—the treatment of black Australians by white Aust r a l ia n s—and in one way or another all of them question the rightness of f policy and administration. But there are other reasons too why I have thuought it justifiable to bring the papers, old and new, between the one sect of covers. The theme and the questions are coeval -with the white settlement of f the continent and the dispossession of the Aborigines. For me, as a \ working anthropologist, they have been a main preoccupation for neearly fifty years. These five decades have straddled a particularly innteresting period of Australian racial history, over the whole of which I ) have had exceptional opportunity to see from close at hand the strtruggle of the powerless against the powerful. The period stretches frcom ‘the bad old days’ of the early 1930s when (see ‘Looking Back’) auuthority could still seriously consider sending a punitive party ‘to tesach the blacks a lesson’, to these more regenerate days. I do not pnroffer the papers in any sense as examples of the ‘objective’ approach in i which an observer of rank injustice writes as if stonily indifferent to huuman values. But throughout 1 have done my best to attain the span annd use the measure that go with serious criticism. Athis Book Looks At 'the Aboriginal Problem' From An Unusual Viewpoint - That Of The Aborigines Themselves, For Whom 'the Aboriginal Problem' Is The White Australian. The Essays Deal With All Those Features Of Traditional Aboriginal Life That Made It So Deeply Satisfying To The Original Australians: Religion, Attachment To Land, Imaginative Culture, And The Whole Ethos On Which The Impact Of Europeans And Their Way Of Life Has Been Destructive. The Aborigines Have Been Dispossessed, Exploited, Rejected And On Occasions Reviled. What We Now Offer Them Is, From An Aboriginal Point Of View, Neither True Reconciliation Nor Equality. The Author Argues That Race Relations Will Deteriorate Even Farther Than The Neuralgic Point To Which Our Ethnocentric Insensibility Has Already Brought Them Unless White Australians Make An Effort To Comprehend The Aboriginal Truths Of Life. The Aborigines -- The Dreaming -- Continuity And Change Among The Aborigines -- Durmugam: A Nangiomeri -- Religion, Totemism And Symbolism -- Caliban Discovered -- The History Of Indifference Thus Begins' -- Gallery Of Southern Man For Canberra -- After The Dreaming -- No, No, Sir James: Polyphemus, Not Goliath -- The Yirrakala Land Case: Dress Rehearsal -- After The Dreaming-whither? -- Aborigines And Australian Society -- Land For Aborigines: Mr. Hunt's Criticisims Examined -- Aborigines In The Affluent Society: The Widening Gap. W. E. H. Stanner. Includes Bibliographies And Indexes.