Black Woman-White Woman: A Story of Aboriginal Australia

Black Woman-White Woman: A Story of Aboriginal Australia
Author: J P Graham
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017-09-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 024433479X

How well do we really know our parents? An emotional journey into family secrets, buried deep for decades. The author's mother revealed her family of origin in her eighty-fourth year. But would it ever be possible to help heal the wounds that she had carried alone for so long? The price to be paid for deceiving those who love us is a heavy one, and must be balanced against the times in which such momentous decisions are made.

The White Girl

The White Girl
Author: Tony Birch
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0702262056

A searing new novel from leading Indigenous storyteller Tony Birch that explores the lengths we will go to in order to save the people we love.Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families. When a new policeman arrives in town, determined to enforce the law, Odette must risk everything to save Sissy and protect everything she loves. In The White Girl, Miles-Franklin-shortlisted author Tony Birch shines a spotlight on the 1960s and the devastating government policy of taking Indigenous children from their families.

Talkin' Up to the White Woman

Talkin' Up to the White Woman
Author: Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452966893

A twentieth-anniversary edition of this tour de force in feminism and Indigenous studies, now with a new preface The twentieth anniversary of the original publication of this influential and prescient work is commemorated with a new edition of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. In this bold book, of its time and ahead of its time, whiteness is made visible in power relations, presenting a dialogic of how white feminists represent Indigenous women in discourse and how Indigenous women self-present. Moreton-Robinson argues that white feminists benefit from colonization: they are overwhelmingly represented and disproportionately predominant, play the key roles, and constitute the norm, the ordinary, and the standard of womanhood. They do not self-present as white but rather represent themselves as variously classed, sexualized, aged, and abled. The disjuncture between representation and self-presentation of Indigenous women and white feminists illuminates different epistemologies and an incommensurability in the social construction of gender. Not so much a study of white womanhood, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman instead reveals an invisible racialized subject position represented and deployed in power relations with Indigenous women. The subject position occupied by middle-class white women is embedded in material and discursive conditions that shape the nature of power relations between white feminists and Indigenous women—and the unjust structural relationship between white society and Indigenous society.

White Woman Black Heart

White Woman Black Heart
Author: Barbara Miller
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2018-03-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9781986706018

Barbara often found herself saying, "the stork dropped me at the wrong house' only to find she was repeating her mother's words. In this riveting memoir exploring race relations and social change, Aboriginal elder Burnum Burnum, told her, "you may be white but you have a black heart, as you understand my people and feel our heart.' He suggested to International Development Action that she take on the Mapoon project and played matchmaker by introducing her to Aboriginal teacher and Australian civil rights movement leader Mick Miller. The Mapoon Aborigines were forcibly moved off their land by the Queensland government in NE Australia in 1963 to make way for mining. With an effective team behind her, Barbara helped them move back in 1974 to much government opposition which saw her under house arrest with Marjorie Wymarra. It also saw Jerry Hudson and Barbara taken to court. In helping the Mapoon people return to their homeland, she found her home as part of an Aboriginal family, firstly Mick's and later Norman's as she remarried many years later, now being with her soulmate Norman about 30 years. It is a must read for those interested in ethnic studies and political science as an isolated outback community whose houses, school, health clinic, store and church were burnt to the ground rose from the ashes and rebuilt despite all the odds. It is a testimony to the Mapoon people's strength. Scroll up the top and click the "buy now" button.

White Mother to a Dark Race

White Mother to a Dark Race
Author: Margaret D. Jacobs
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0803211007

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous communities in the United States and Australia suffered a common experience at the hands of state authorities: the removal of their children to institutions in the name of assimilating American Indians and protecting Aboriginal people. Although officially characterized as benevolent, these government policies often inflicted great trauma on indigenous families and ultimately served the settler nations? larger goals of consolidating control over indigenous peoples and their lands. White Mother to a Dark Racetakes the study of indigenous education and acculturation in new directions in its examination of the key roles white women played in these policies of indigenous child-removal. Government officials, missionaries, and reformers justified the removal of indigenous children in particularly gendered ways by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of indigenous mothers, the alleged barbarity of indigenous men, and the lack of a patriarchal nuclear family. Often they deemed white women the most appropriate agents to carry out these child-removal policies. Inspired by the maternalist movement of the era, many white women were eager to serve as surrogate mothers to indigenous children and maneuvered to influence public policy affecting indigenous people. Although some white women developed caring relationships with indigenous children and others became critical of government policies, many became hopelessly ensnared in this insidious colonial policy.

Not Just Black and White

Not Just Black and White
Author: Lesley Williams
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2015-08-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0702255947

Lesley Williams is forced to leave Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement and her family at a young age to work as a domestic servant. Apart from a bit of pocket money, Lesley never sees her wages – they are kept 'safe' for her and for countless others just like her. She is taught not to question her life, until desperation makes her start to wonder, where is all that money she earned? So begins a nine-year journey for answers which will test every ounce of her resolve. Inspired by her mother's quest, a teenage Tammy Williams enters a national writing competition. The winning prize takes Tammy and Lesley to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch and ultimately to the United Nations in Geneva. Told with honesty and humor, Not Just Black and White is an extraordinary memoir about two women determined to make sure history is not forgotten.

Uncommon Ground

Uncommon Ground
Author: Anna Cole
Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2005
Genre: Aboriginal Australians
ISBN: 0855754850

Showcasing some of the latest and most interesting work in Australia on gender and crosscultural history, this unique collection offers a diverse group of essays about the complex roles white women played in Australian Indigenous histories.

White Tears/Brown Scars

White Tears/Brown Scars
Author: Ruby Hamad
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 194822674X

Called “powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, this explosive book of history and cultural criticism reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color. Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep “ownership” of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women’s active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long overdue validation of the experiences of women of color. Discussing subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the viral BBQ Becky video, and 19th century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race. She shows how the division between innocent white women and racialized, sexualized women of color was created, and why this division is crucial to confront. Along the way, there are revelatory responses to questions like: Why are white men not troubled by sexual assault on women? (See Christine Blasey Ford.) With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialized within, a reality that we must apprehend in order to fight. "A stunning and thorough look at White womanhood that should be required reading for anyone who claims to be an intersectional feminist. Hamad’s controlled urgency makes the book an illuminating and poignant read. Hamad is a purveyor of such bold thinking, the only question is, are we ready to listen?" —Rosa Boshier, The Washington Post

Am I Black Enough For You?

Am I Black Enough For You?
Author: Anita Heiss
Publisher: Random House Australia
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Aboriginal Australian authors
ISBN: 1761046160

The story of an urban-based high achieving Wiradyuri woman working to break down stereotypes and build bridges between black and white Australia. I'm Aboriginal. I'm just not the Aboriginal person a lot of people want or expect me to be. What does it mean to be Aboriginal? Why is Australia so obsessed with notions of identity? Anita Heiss, successful author and passionate advocate for Aboriginal literacy, rights and representation, was born a member of the Wiradyuri nation of central New South Wales but was raised in the suburbs of Sydney and educated at the local Catholic school. In this heartfelt and revealing memoir, told in her distinctive, wry style, with large doses of humour, Anita Heiss gives a firsthand account of her experiences as a woman with a Wiradyuri mother and Austrian father. Anita explains the development of her activist consciousness, how she strives to be happy and healthy, and the work she undertakes every day to ensure the world she leaves behind will be more equitable and understanding than it is today.

Sister Girl

Sister Girl
Author: Jackie Huggins
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2022-01-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0702266655

The pieces in this seminal collection represent almost four decades of writing by historian and activist Jackie Huggins. These essays, speeches, and interviews combine both the public and the personal in a bold trajectory tracing one Murri woman's journey towards self-discovery and human understanding. As a widely respected cultural educator and analyst, Huggins offers an Aboriginal view of the history, values, and struggles of Indigenous people. Sister Girl reflects on many important and timely topics, including identity, activism, leadership, and reconciliation. It challenges accepted notions of the appropriateness of mainstream feminism in Aboriginal society and of white historians writing Indigenous history. Jackie Huggins' words, then and now, offer wisdom, urgency and hope.