"Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia" ed. by Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker

This book examines the emotional engagements of both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people with Indigenous history. The contributors are a mix of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous scholars, who in different ways examine how the past lives on in the present, as myth, memory, and history.

Each chapter throws fresh light on an aspect of history-making by or about Indigenous people, such as the extent of massacres on the frontier, the myth of Aboriginal male idleness, the controversy over Flynn of the Inland, the meaning of the Referendum of 1967, and the policyand practice of Indigenous child removal.
Contents
Dedication. viiAcknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Ian Thorpe
Introduction - Frances Peters-Little
Part one: massacres
1. The country has another past: Queensland and the History Wars - Raymond Evans
2. ‘Hard evidence’: the debate about massacre in the Black War in Tasmania - Lyndall Ryan
3. Epistemological vertigo and allegory: thoughts on massacres, actual, surrogate, and averted – Beersheba, Wake in Fright, Australia - John Docker
Part two: myths
4. Remembering the referendum with compassion - Frances Peters-Little
5. Idle men: the eighteenth-century roots of the Indigenous indolence myth - Shino Konishi
6. ‘These unoffending people’: myth, history and the idea of Aboriginal resistance in David Collins’ Account of the English Colony in New South Wales - Rachel Standfield
7. Demythologising Flynn, with Love: contesting missionaries in Central Australia in the twentieth century - David Trudinger
Part three: memory and oral history
8. Paul Robeson’s visit to Australia and Aboriginal activism, 1960 - Ann Curthoys
9. Using poetry to capture the Aboriginal voice in oral history transcripts - Lorina Barker
Part four: identity, myth and memory
10. Making a debut: myths, memories and mimesis - Anna Cole
11. Identity and identification: Aboriginality from the Spanish Civil War to the French Ghettos - Vanessa Castejon
12. Urban Aboriginal ceremony: when seeing is not believing - Kristina Everett
13. Island Home Country: working with Aboriginal protocols in a documentary film about colonisation and growing up white in Tasmania - Jeni Thornley
Part five: the Stolen Generations
14. Reconciliation without history: state crime and state punishment in Chile and Australia - Peter Read
15. Overheard – conversations of a museum curator - Jay Arthur, with Barbara Paulson and Troy Pickwick
16. On the significance of saying ‘sorry’: Apology and reconciliation in Australia - Isabelle Auguste