In the song “Solid Rock” the author, Shane Howard, emphasises how the English “white people” stole the aboriginals land. The knowledge the author used from the side of the aboriginals was based on real viewpoints, beliefs and emotions helped engage the audience into believing their point of view. In the song the author creates representations of the aboriginal’s experiences and struggles with finding their culture, people, identity and most importantly their country and place. Powerful language features help the audience to be conveyed into the aboriginal’s viewpoints as the Europeans take their land. Comprehensive images of the viewpoints are created through metaphors such as, “we’re running from the heart of darkness” and “searching for the
heart of light.” The use of the noun “heart” emphasises the reader into thinking how important the land is to the Aboriginals and points out that the heart is Uluru. This is clearer to see when the author uses imperative voice, “You’re standing on solid rock” pointing out you’re on their land in this case Uluru. The use of the evocative language “running” and “searching” portrays the audience into thinking that the aboriginals are trying to find their culture and beliefs signalling that the Europeans are trying to change their culture and beliefs. The repetition, “white man, white law, white gun” implies this. The use of irony, “out here nothing changes, not in a hurry anyway” effectively implies that in the aboriginals eyes nothing changes but now the Europeans are changing their Country and Place, people, identity, culture and beliefs. Of all the songs written by Shane Howard of aboriginal peoples Shane Howard’s “Solid Rock” stands out by far. He effectively portrayed the struggles of the aboriginals when the Europeans arrived. The song effectively positions the audience into understanding how the Country and Place, people, culture and beliefs are so important to Aboriginal people.
Hooper’s compelling and strategically written text paints an Australian context where a distinct racial divide separates the country; one where racism is rife and where white supremacy is rampant. Hooper urges the reader to accept that in the context of colonial Australia, Aboriginals faced such extreme oppression that they resorted to summoning spirits to doom their cruel white colonisers. She recounts a walk to a cave in Cape York, where she intentionally selects paintings depicting destructive images of white colonisers being “doomed”, highlighting the rifles which the white troopers brandished. The marginalised Aboriginals resigned to using “purri purri” (sorcery) against the police, which emphasises the idea that in this context, the Aboriginals felt so oppressed that they resorted to conjuring spirits for protection. Hooper describes a painting in which under a white man’s shirt, “he was reptilian”, and the adjective “reptilian” allows the audience to understand that in this context, the Aboriginals felt so threatened that they had to draw the trooper as a snake.
Good morning Mrs Dover and 8D. I have chosen to analyse the film clip “black fella, white fella” by the Warumpi band, and have determined that the song and associated images is partially successful in communicating aboriginal values, such as culture, land and family. The lyrics include the language features repetition, alliteration and rhetorical questions to deliver a message of reconciliation and equality. These features are also supported by visual imagery that is intended to support the ideas within the song.
Throughout time, many people feel as if they have lost their connection to their cultural from outside influences and numerous disruptions. Disruptions to one’s cultural can be seen in the Picture book The Rabbits by john Marsden and Shaun tan which is an an allegory of the invasion of Australia. Another example is the film avatar by James Cameron. The creators of these works are expressing the effect of man on nature and disruption it brings upon the cultural of the indigenous people who are the traditional owners of the land.
Tribal Voice by Yothu Yindi is a song which incorporates perspective about how aboriginals were treated badly and cast out and that they should all stand up to take back what is theirs . This song is an aboriginal perceptive that they were treated badly though they gave the people of Australia home, even though they get no rewards or thanks. This song represents the aboriginal thinking of colonised Australia saying it wasn’t fair to themselves and their children as they took care of the land and it was just taken away and they were cast out. The indigenous people are still dreaming for a day that they can be fully welcomed back into society, but they now are going to speak for themselves and do whatever it takes so that the future generation of aboriginal culture have a better future.
Although the author’s words are simple, they create a mood into the illustrations that truly emphasise the emotion of the indigenous point of view. Viewers can than feel more of what they can see, an example of this is when the authors used different sized text in “stole our children.” This text with the illustration can truly create an effect on the way it is read and viewed by, making viewers feel empathy as the size of each words shrinks defining the children’s positon as they get further away from their parent. This attains the Europeans guilt on the choices they had made as the story is seen in the indigenous point of view on how they suffered due to the past horrendous choices made by the Europeans at that
Struggles by Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people for recognition of their rights and interests have been long and arduous (Choo & Hollobach: 2003:5). The ‘watershed’ decision made by the High Court of Australia in 1992 (Mabo v Queensland) paved the way for Indigenous Australians to obtain what was ‘stolen’ from them in 1788 when the British ‘invaded’ (ATSIC:1988). The focus o...
As a result, both films represent Natives Americans under the point of view of non-Native directors. Despite the fact that they made use of the fabricated stereotypes in their illustrations of the indigenous people, their portrayal was revolutionary in its own times. Each of the films add in their own way a new approach to the representation of indigenous people, their stories unfold partly unlike. These differences make one look at the indigenous not only as one dimensional beings but as multifaceted beings, as Dunbar say, “they are just like us.” This is finally a sense of fairness and respect by the non-native populations to the Native Indians.
How can you write about a culture whose history is passed on by oral traditions? Better yet, how can you comprehend a culture’s past which a dominant society desired to assimilate? These two questions outline the difficulty in understanding the historiography of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. In 2003, Paige Raibmon published her article, “Living on Display: Colonial Visions of Aboriginal Domestic Spaces.” Her work, although focused on Canada’s colonial “notions of domesticity,” presents the role of Aboriginals as performers to European notions of indigenous culture and identity. Early social historians believe that Aboriginals’ place in history is in their interactions with European Jesuits. A decade later, historians argue Aboriginals exemplify a subordinate culture fighting against assimilating and hegemonic forces. More recently, social historical perspective shows Aboriginals as performers of the white-man’s constructed “authentic-Indian.” Obviously, there is disparity between historians’ viewpoints but each decade’s published histories concur with James Opp and John Walsh’s concept of local resistance. Using Raibmon’s paper as a starting point, a chronological examination of select histories reveals an evolving social historiography surrounding historians’ perceptions of Aboriginals’ local resistance attempts.
Australian indigenous culture is the world’s oldest surviving culture, dating back sixty-thousand years. Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders have been represented in a myriad of ways through various channels such as poetry, articles, and images, in both fiction and non-fiction. Over the years, they have been portrayed as inferior, oppressed, isolated, principled and admirable. Three such texts that portray them in these ways are poems Circles and Squares and Grade One Primary by Ali Cobby Eckermann, James Packer slams booing; joins three cheers for footballer and the accompanying visual text and Heywire article Family is the most important thing to an islander by Richard Barba. Even though the texts are different as ….. is/are …., while
However, once policy makers realized that not all Indigenous Australians wished to conform to their ways of being, policies began to shift. In 1967, a national referendum granted citizenship to Aboriginal Australians. Despite this referendum, the Aboriginal Australians sought to establish their own identity outside of European notions of Aboriginality. In looking at how the Indigenous Australians have come to define themselves, the author describes two modes of Aboriginal identity: local and pan-Aboriginal. According to European classifications, Indigenous populations were seen as a homogenous group. However, defining the Indigenous Australians in this way diminishes geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity that existed among these populations. According to Tonkinson, “despite many cultural similarities between groups, it is the differences that are most conspicuous and significant from the Aboriginal viewpoint…[Aboriginal] people often invoke their uniqueness of language, traditional territory, and kinship in asserting their [local] identity” (193). Pan-Aboriginality, is the “construction of a common culture out of a situation of cultural diversity,” and this, according to Tonkinson, is “essential in building solidarity among a minority population and endowing it with a political force in the Australian nation” (215). In uniting themselves under a common struggle, Aboriginals have
Throughout both ‘Rainbow’s End’ and ‘The Rabbits’, the audience discovers the plights that the Aboriginal Australians faced, due to discrimination and assimilation, in intensely confronting, yet intensely meaningful ways. We see how the discrimination and forced assimilation of cultures was common in the lead up to modern times because of composers like Harrison, Marsden and Tan reminding us of these events, allowing us to discover and rediscover our past wrongs through their works, in order to pave the way for a brighter, harmonious future. Without these documentations and retellings of events such as these, history would repeat itself, conflicts would be more apparent and we as a species would not be able to thrive and prosper due to our prejudices and superiority complexes.
It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers.
The poems ‘Ambrose’ written by Roberta Sykes and ‘We Are Going’ written by Oodgeroo Noonuccal both provide similar opinions on indigenous issues and white settlement in Australia using subject matter, poetic devices and structural elements. The poets both have similar negative views.
“He might see the splinter of a canoe, fragile as a dead leaf against the dazzle of the sun on the water” this quote recalls the idea of the evasiveness and the facilitation of nature. Aborigines were everywhere but they imperceptible they could be recognized and distinguished with difficulty. It was almost impossible to approach them. The comparison with the dead leaf remarks their mimesis with nature. As they not only benefit from it but also imitate it. It seemed as if the only authority they respected was
Indigenous people in Australia experienced loss of Place, something that Oodgeroo Noonuccal expressed through her use of poet devices. The use of repetition in “We are” in the poem is used by Noonuccal to establish a connection between the Indigenous Australians and the land. A clear example of this is “We are as strangers here now, but the white tribe are the strangers” (Noonuccal, 1965). After the Europeans settled upon Australia, they took over the land and claimed it as theirs. The