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‘WERE YOU EVER SAVAGES?’ ABORIGINAL INSIDERS AND PASTORALISTS' PATRONAGE
Author(s) -
Rowse Tim
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
oceania
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.356
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1834-4461
pISSN - 0029-8077
DOI - 10.1002/j.1834-4461.1987.tb02263.x
Subject(s) - ethnography , pastoralism , hegemony , intermediary , reading (process) , sociology , history , anthropology , ethnology , media studies , geography , political science , law , politics , marketing , forestry , business , livestock
This paper is a reading of the life story of Jack Sullivan, an Aboriginal stock worker employed by the Durack family in the east Kimberley. It draws upon ethnographic and other writing to suggest the processes of pastoralist hegemony. Durack rule constituted several male Aboriginal workers as trusted intermediaries with those who were more distant from the colonists. Autonomous and skilful, Jack aligned himself with the ‘inside’ world centred on the homestead, against the danger ‘outside’. The ‘inside’ position seems to have had some roots in waves of Aboriginal cultural renewal (from the south and east). The paper uses ethnographic evidence to interpret the local eminence of one agent of this renewal, Boxer, a Queensland Aborigine who helped raise Sullivan.