Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia

Abstract

ticularly on this question about how to plumb people’s choices and reconstruct the contexts within which those choices were created and circumscribed. Poignantly, Gibson evokes the sense of crisis thatmanyof theAboriginalmenwemeet in the book were experiencing – a deeply-felt concern about how the knowledge they possessed would be passed on and carried forward into a future that seemed far from certain. Strehlow’s archive, like many publicly held historical collections, encapsulates the situation that its ‘co-creators’ were grappling with: the gamble that their knowledge would be preserved even as it was distanced from the places where it was recorded and dissociated from those who so generously shared it. What makes Gibson’s book so valuable is that it commences the vital work of reconnecting collections and ‘communities’ at a time when he can still draw upon living local and family memories about the people, places, and practices it ‘documents’. This brings me to the second innovation that Gibson makes in approaching Strehlow’s archive: his decision to focus on the work that Strehlow did with the Anmatyerr. More usually, the Strehlow archive is mined for the Arrernte knowledge it holds. This was not an abstract or purely intellectual decision on Gibson’s part: it grew out of the relationships that he already had with Anmatyerr, his awareness of their own deep interest in the collection, and the opportunity that those relationships provided to enter the archive through a different door that did not demand quite so much homage to Strehlow himself. Because of his own grounding in place, Gibson can read the material alongside the people whose questions, curiosity, commitment and knowledge revivify its meaning and open up its possibilities. Through this process of slow, relational research, Gibson creates a thoroughly striking ethnography of an earlier ethnography and its products. On that score, his book has something in common with notable recent histories that take a similar approach, such as Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angus Downs and Tiffany Shellam’s Meeting the Waylo. Through this grounded, localised, collaborative and relational encounter with a valuable, if opaque, collection, Gibson contributes another seminal case study to a growing body of scholarship that insists upon working collaboratively, relationally and respectfully on historical collections and archives, paying careful attention to the agency and contexts of the many people who made them, including those whose contribution has hitherto been hidden, and the contemporary challenges and opportunities they represent for the people and communities whose inheritances they are.