Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership

by Peter Read

This extraordinary book explores the feelings of non-Aboriginal Australians as they articulate their sense of belonging to the land. Peter Read asks the pivotal What is the meaning of places important to non-Aboriginal Australians from which the Indigenous people have already been dispossessed? How are contemporary Australians thinking through the problem of knowing that their places of attachment are also the places that Aboriginals loved--and lost? And are the sites of all our deep affections to be contested, articulated, shared, foregone or possessed absolutely?

Genres: Nonfiction

258 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Peter Read is an ARC Professorial Fellow at the Department of History, University of Sydney, and Adjunct Professor, Department of History, ANU. Currently he is researching a history of Aboriginal Sydney, and is slowly building the website A History of Aboriginal Sydney.

Peter Read coined the phrase 'the stolen generation', first used by him as a title for a magazine article. In 1981 he helped create Link-up, an organisation to bring Aborigines who had been abducted back to their parents. It went on to become a major force leading to the Stolen Generation enquiry. On the way Peter wrote many influential publications, including The Lost Children (1988), Charles Perkins: A Biography and Lost Places (1997).

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the really big political challenges in former colonies of settlement and in the formulation and development of postcolonial politics is how to deal with the descendants of settlers who feel a sense of indigeneity, but do not see themselves as of the colonised indigenous peoples. This takes on a real and specific challenge in the settlement of land claims, and restitution/atonement for unjust alienation of indigenous lands. We had instances of this in the late 1990s in New Zealand when farmers on Crown 'owned' leased land objected to those lands being used in Maori claims settlements because these farmers asserted a sense of 'ownership' and indigeneity (not that many of them used either term).

In this book Peter Read returns to his concerns with Australian's feelings of connections with the place they live to ask how white Australians can feel that connection when indigenous Australians' connections are not recognised and the brutality of land alienation (or in many cases even that the land was previously owned) are not admitted. Read writes himself and his emotional/affective connections with parts of the North Sydney coast, draws on native and newcomer writers, poets, and artists as well as farmers, school students and others to explore how and why Australians feel themselves of the land they live in. The result is a book that is insightful, scholarly (but not dry) book that takes us to heart of being newcomer in an old land.

This is a beautiful, elegant and powerful book - simply superb.