Indigenous and Other Australians Since 1901

As Australia became a nation in 1901, no one anticipated that ‘Aboriginal affairs’ would become an on-going national preoccupation. Not ‘dying out’ as predicted, Aboriginal numbers recovered and – along with Torres Strait Islanders – they became an articulate presence, aggrieved at colonial authority’s interventions into family life and continuing dispossession. Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 narrates their recovery – not only in numbers but in cultural confidence and critical self-awareness.

Tim Rowse has been writing on Australian Indigenous affairs since the early 1980s and is one Australia’s most significant scholars of Indigenous Studies. He worked for many years at the Menzies School for Health Research in Alice Springs.