Raymond Matthew Nichol, Socialization, Land and Citizenship Among Aboriginal Australians. Reconciling Indigenous and Western Forms of Education.

Ramsland, John

Raymond Matthew Nichol, Socialization, Land and Citizenship Among Aboriginal Australians. Reconciling Indigenous and Western Forms of Education, Queenston, Ontario, Canada, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. 460 pp.

At the core of this timely, convincing and complex study is the disquieting history of the remote Murrin Bridge Community of New South Wales and its fluctuating fortunes which assists in breaking 'the Great Australian Silence' Silence' (as WE Stanner evocatively called it in his 1968 Boyer lectures) over the Dispossession and its aftermath of social injustice. The author takes pains not to endorse the enthusiastic embrace by the Howard government and the conservative mainstream of Keith Windschuttle's denialist history. As Malcolm Knox recently commented, there is no 'Windschuttle in rose-coloured glasses' here.

Nichol concentrates on the inadequate sometimes disastrous provisions of Europeanised education for the young in this sequestered community. He views them as a case study of elementary schooling that is representative of most Aboriginal missions, reserves and stations during the first half of the twentieth century. As already announced in his book's title, he proposes a strong acceptance of traditional cultural learning so that it is not in direct competition with European education and driven out of the classroom. Rather, both processes for the young, he believes, should work in harmony and cooperation.

The author takes us through the debilitating consequences of successive but overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) policies under the New South Wales Aboriginal Protection Board, the Aboriginal Welfare Board, its successor in the 1940s, and beyond it--segregation, integration, self-determination, self-management, local autonomy and the recognition of citizenship.

The case study that Nichol explores is a prism through which past mistakes and miscalculations can be intelligently viewed and analysed. As Aboriginal Communities have been less reported on through thorough research in New South Wales than elsewhere, Nichol's disturbing study breaks new ground with great detail. He makes it clear, however, that Murrin Bridge is an economically depressed community not of its own making and, despite this, there are stable communal family structures in which children are born and reared and where there exists strong bonds of mutuality, obligation and trust.

Murrin Bridge was founded as an experimental Aboriginal station in 1949 when residents as a whole were transferred from the reserve at Menindee, over 300 kilometres away to the west. Because of the involvement of the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart missionaries, the Menindee reserve was known by the people there as 'the mission', and the name stuck. Before 1934, the very same people had lived in the government reserve at Carowra Tank until the tank ran dry.

The Murrin Bridge Community is made up of Wiradjuri and Wangaapuwan people. They are a discrete community that have been forced to move over an unjust terrain from one place to another. The Menindee settlement had been a disaster and an acute political embarrassment to government. On 15 June 1945, the New South Wales Chief Secretary announced that a model agricultural Aboriginal re-settlement would be built at Murrin Bridge to accommodate 300 Aborigines. It was not completed until 1949. Nichol is insightful in his treatment of the educational provisions that followed. The Murrin Bridge village was intended as a total Foucaultian re-education centre, but it did not work out that way due to cultural resistance.

The author's research methodology is inclusive and ambitiously all-encompassing, drawing from ethnology, anthropology, history, human geography and so on. While this approach has major advantages, the resultant text becomes weighed down, if not careful, particularly with too much repetition of research questions and discussion about the different research approaches used. Socialization, Land and Citizenship Among Aboriginal Australians reads too much like a thesis, rather than as a book. But this is part of the publisher's intention which is to provide narrowly for research libraries, rather than even a highly educated reading public.

In sum, there is much of significance in this volume trying to get out. I would urge the author to re-write and re-publish it so that his acute insights about Aboriginal education can be shared more widely. A good text editor is much needed to assist this process.

JOHN RAMSLAND

Emeritus Professor of History

The University of Newcastle