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Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race. Gillian Cowlishaw. Williston, VT: Blackwell, 2004. 272 pp.
In Australia, from around the early 1970s, there was a shift in both formal and informal policies and practices of discrimination and repression toward Aborigines. After decades of efforts toward assimilation, there emerged a federal policy of self-determination, and the national government assumed powers to legislate with respect to Aboriginal affairs, sharing and negotiating them thenceforth with state governments.
Cowlishaw's book locates us squarely in contemporary, unsettled relationships subsequent to those shifts. Aborigines have been invited to be self-defining, but the idealized expectations that have come to underlie such a notion grant little recognition, understanding, or legitimacy to Aboriginal sociality as it exists in practice. A leitmotif of the book, framing beginning and end, is the "riot," in which some significance is to be accorded to the qualifying quotation marks, which feature in quite a number of newspaper reports of such events.
In a number of Australian country towns and cities over the past fifteen years or so, street battles have taken place between Aborigines and (mainly) police. These have sometimes been called "riots"; the last one in Sydney's Redfern...