Field Methodse
Everyone sits together and knowledge moves both ways, with no single person steering the talk. Name this method, widely used when researching with an Aboriginal community.
What is a yarning circle?
Question: Explaining the purpose of research, how a recording will be used and that a participant can withdraw at any time is necessary to obtain this.
What is informed consent?
Who made a source, when, where and why. What are you establishing about the source?
What is its origin or provenance?
What term describes Aboriginal peoples being forced from their traditional lands and denied access to them?
What is dispossession?
A plant or animal that links a person to their ancestors and Country and creates a responsibility to care for that species.
What is a totem?
our recorded interview with an Elder, photographs you took yourself, and a Land Council’s own newsletter all belong to this category.
What are primary sources?
Established under NSW legislation in 1983, this body represents Aboriginal people locally on land claims, culture and heritage.
What is a Local Aboriginal Land Council?
A 1950s government pamphlet depicts an Aboriginal family living a suburban lifestyle and promotes their “new life”. Which government policy was it promoting?
What is assimilation?
What was the legal fiction that Australia belonged to no one and was used to justify British occupation without treaty or purchase?
What is terra nullius?
Initiation, funerals, trade meetings and the passing on of law all took place through this important traditional practice.
What is ceremony?
A survey counting how many households in the community use the local health service produces this kind of data.
What is quantitative data?
Question: You want to photograph a rock engraving site for your case study. What must you do before using the camera?
What is seek permission from the relevant community and follow any restrictions?
A settler’s 1840s diary describing a frontier clash is completely one-sided. Why might it still be valuable to a historian?
What is the bias itself provides evidence of settler attitudes, language and justifications?
Christianity traditionally locates the sacred in a transcendent God and written scripture. Where does Aboriginal spirituality locate the sacred?
What is in Country itself?
What NSW body was given power from 1909 to control Aboriginal people and later remove Aboriginal children from their families?
What is the Aborigines Protection Board?
You interview three organisations in one community about the same issue and get three different answers. What should a competent researcher conclude?
What is diversity of opinion within the community?
During an interview, you are told that a story is men’s or women’s business and is not for public sharing. What should you do?
What is respect the restriction and do not record, publish or share the information?
One term asks whether a source is accurate. The other asks whether it helps answer your particular historical question. Name both.
What are reliability and usefulness?
This practice involves cool, patchy, low-intensity burning to regenerate Country and reduce fuel loads.
What is cultural burning, or fire-stick farming?
Name the generations affected by government child-removal policies, the 1997 national report into their experiences, and the year of the National Apology.
Who are the Stolen Generations; what is Bringing Them Home (1997); and what is 2008?
The principle that the community, rather than the researcher, owns the information gathered about it and can check, correct and approve what is published.
What is Indigenous data sovereignty?
One can only be given by a Traditional Owner of that Country. The other can be offered by anyone, including a visitor. Name both.
What are a Welcome to Country and an Acknowledgement of Country?
Colonial records are silent about much of what happened to Aboriginal communities. What kind of evidence can help fill these silences?
What are oral histories and community testimony?
Name the 1992 High Court decision that rejected terra nullius and the Commonwealth Act passed the following year.
What are the Mabo decision (1992) and the Native Title Act 1993?
What are the three parts of the working definition of Aboriginality used in Australia today?
What are descent, self-identification and community acceptance?