Laura Rademaker

Australian National University | ANU · School of History

The rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and most fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as archives...

On our blue planet, oceans have long shaped human histories. Generations have crossed the seas, fished their depths, and navigated their currents, encountering new peoples and places on the waves and on the shores. In this roundtable discussion, edited by Ruth Morgan and Laura Rademaker, we reflect on just how oceans have shaped deep human pasts an...

Over the course of the twentieth century, scholars have found diverse ways of reading ‘Aboriginal Dreaming’ stories as historical accounts of events in Australia’s ‘deep time’. This article argues that, when analysed alongside developments in Australian settler–Indigenous relations, the various readings of Aboriginal stories map onto changing views...

In seeking to understand the deep past, the knowledges of First Nations peoples and of the various academic disciplines can seem incommensurable. In this essay, we argue the concept of “historicities”, that is, the encultured ways of narrating and conceiving of the past offers to enrich the study of deep history. Sensitivity to the various ways the...

Rock art created in the recent past has often been interpreted as a passive reflection of Indigenous curiosity at newly introduced phenomena. However, more recent analyses have tried to refigure such depictions as active and innovative artworks with social and cultural roles to play. Likewise, most contact rock art studies identify and interpret co...

This article outlines the possibilities of a deep history practice that engages with rather than sidelines Indigenous historical knowledges. Many Indigenous people insist that their knowledge of the deep past demands engagement. They do so, we suggest, because scientific historicism and Indigenous knowledge-systems and historicities already impinge...

Settler Australia is sometimes said to have experienced a ‘time revolution’ on realizing that Aboriginal people have dwelt here for millennia, mirroring the earlier European ‘time revolution’ when Europeans discovered humanity’s ‘deep’ past. This essay unpicks these twin ‘revolutions’ and explores how the idea of ‘time revolutions’ serves a settler...

This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Aboriginal rock art artists, drawing together insights from the disciplines of archaeology and biography, as well as from Indigenous knowledge-holders, in order to explore the life and work of a relatively unknown rock painter from western Arnhem Land in Australia: Narlim (born c. 19...

Arriving in the remote Arnhem Land Aboriginal settlement of Oenpelli (Gunbalanya) in 1925, Alf and Mary Dyer aimed to bring Christ to a former buffalo shooting camp and an Aboriginal population many whites considered difficult to control. The Bible in Buffalo Country: Oenpelli Mission 1925–1931 represents a snapshot of the tumultuous first six year...

White women, Aboriginal missions and Australian settler governments. Maternal contradictions. By Joanna Cruikshank and Patricia Grimshaw. (Studies in Christian Mission, 56.) Pp. x + 207 incl. 4 maps. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2019. €99. 978 90 04 39700 2 - Volume 71 Issue 3 - Laura Rademaker

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimil...

In the 1950s, anthropologist Jane Goodale had bright hopes for her informant Happy Cook, an Aboriginal girl from the Tiwi Islands in North Australia, who she considered constrained by paternalistic government policies. Goodale was devastated witnessing Cook’s suffering over following decades. Looking at Goodale’s feelings of friendship turned to gr...

Historians and anthropologists have increasingly argued that the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity occurred as they wove the new faith into their traditions. Yet this finding risks overshadowing how Indigenous peoples themselves understood the history of Christianity in their societies. This article, a case study of the Tiwi of North...

This article examines the sectarianism that divided feminist organisations in early twentieth-century NSW. In 1903, the Catholic feminist Annie Golding took legal action against the Protestant paper, The Watchman, accusing it of libel. Through an examination of the five leading women embroiled in the Golding affair, this article shows that women ac...

When the feminist preacher Maude Royden (1876–1956) toured Australia in 1928, she promoted modern religion for modern women. This article examines the Australian press coverage of Royden’s visit to shed light on the complex relationships between religion, modernity and the female body as they were constituted in Australia in the 1920s. In doing so,...

‘Cuppa tea Christians’ were Aboriginal people whose faith was supposedly only as deep as their desire for a cuppa. At the Church Missionary Society of Australia’s Angurugu mission to Anindilyakwa people in the Northern Territory, missionaries in the 1960s suspected that most ‘conversions’ were only shallow. This article examines the long associatio...

This article investigates the ways local mission and national politics shaped linguistic research work in mid-20th century Australia through examining the case of the Church Missionary Society’s Angurugu Mission on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory and research into the Anindilyakwa language. The paper places missionary linguistics in the co...

Judith Stokes had always hoped to be a missionary linguist and translate the Bible. But on her arrival at Angurugu, the Church Mission Society of Australia (CMS) Aboriginal Mission on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory in 1952 as a schoolteacher, she discovered that linguists were not required. By looking at the experiences of Judith Stokes,...

This article investigates the ways local mibion and national politics shaped linguistic research work in mid-20th century Australia through examining the case of the Church Mibionary Society's Angurugu Mibion on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory and research into the Anindilyakwa language. The paper places mibionary linguistics in the contex...

This thesis examines the ways missionary encounters with indigenous languages challenged or contributed to processes of colonisation - an issue that is contested by historians and anthropologists alike. Missionaries all over the world have faced the challenge of sharing their Word with another culture, another language. The thesis grapples with the...

The survival of the Anindilyakwa language of Groote Eylandt on its encounter with English is a story of Aboriginal people’s adaptability and perseverance in the face of alternate visions for their island. When the Church Missionary Society arrived and, with Anindilyakwa people, established the Angurugu mission, an ongoing tension began over which l...