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Archaeology and Aboriginal protest: the influence of Rhys Jones's Tasmanian work on Australian historiography

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posted on 2023-05-20, 08:10 authored by Rebe TaylorRebe Taylor
In 1977 archaeologist Rhys Jones asked a question that sparked a controversy: if Europeans had never reached Tasmania, had the Aborigines been nonetheless ‘doomed to a slow strangulation of the mind’? Some contemporaries accused Jones of reiterating nineteenth-century ‘Social Darwinism’, a charge Lyndall Ryan has recently renewed as ‘scientific racism’. In contrast, this article argues that Jones, a left-wing Welshman, intended to make a poetic comparison between the possible effects of isolation and a history of genocide. The assumption that genocide had ended in Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction potentially undermined Australia's earliest and most radical emergent indigenous movement. The controversy that followed was pivotal to Australian Aboriginal and academic relations, and has shaped fundamentally how Tasmanian, and Australian, history is written.

History

Publication title

Australian Historical Studies

Volume

45

Pagination

331-349

ISSN

1031-461X

Department/School

College Office - College of Arts, Law and Education

Publisher

Routledge

Place of publication

Australia

Rights statement

Copyright © 2019 Informa UK Limited This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Australian Historical Studies on 19 September 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1031461X.2014.948021

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Understanding Australia’s past; Conserving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture

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