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Notes
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n o t e s 241 One: Places and People of KatherineTown 1. Many Aborigines of Katherine, particularly the regular residents of the town camps as opposed to in-town residential locations, commonly use a tripartite nomenclature of distinctions:they speak of “whitefella,”“blackfella,”and“yellafella ,”the latter used to refer to people of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent.(In this area,“Chinese”or“Chinamen,”who were numerically dominant in phases of earlyTerritory settlement years and are still present in numbers inTerritory towns and in Darwin,tend to be distinguished as such and are not grouped with either “white” or “yellow.”)This usage may sound offensive, but one should not immediately impute nuances to it based on other forms of social experience. Even “black” mothers may refer to mixed-blood children they may have had as “yellafella,” without necessarily intending offense and despite the oppressive history of efforts to prevent“cohabitation”and“miscegenation”and the removal and institutionalization of “part-caste” children, which in this part of Australia continued into the 1960s (see Cummings 1990,Austin 1993). In Katherine, people of mixed descent not only experienced removal and institutionalization in considerable numbers, but also were subject to schooling and work experience in ways that contributed to setting them off from “blackfellas” (whom some of them still call“natives,”following earlier usage).Some older people of mixed descent in the Katherine region still speak of themselves as“colored,”and distinguish themselves from both “whites” and “natives,” also following earlier usage. But all these designations are temporally as well as socially stratified. Since about the 1970s, acceptable usage nationwide has tended toward a generalized designation,“Aborigine.” In place of designations based on degrees of blood or observable color (for fuller accounts of which, see Austin 1993,Tonkinson 1990,Trigger 1989), a Commonwealth definition of 1970 specifies an“Aborigine”as a person descended from the Aboriginal race of Australia,identified as such by himself and so accepted by a relevant community. In southern and eastern Australia, where there are now few people of “full blood” as compared with parts of the north, and with the emergence of forms of historical consciousness still not typical of many northern Aborigines , designations such as “blackfella” and “yellafella,” and the very making of such a distinction, are undoubtedly widely regarded as offensive.This note presents common usages as I encountered them in the Katherine region. 2. I would not like to be seen to ignore exceptions to this generalization, and especially attempts to theorize change in recent ethnography.The “remote-area” Aboriginalist ethnography has tended to be especially traditionalist in character, from classics such as W. L.Warner’s Black Civilization (1937) onward.Tonkinson’s Victors of the Desert Crusade (1974) was an exception in the extent to which he considered the effect of missionization in remote Western Australia, though his emphasis remained upon the“triumph”of desert people in sustaining their own culture ,seen in terms of autonomous,and largely religiously based,meanings.On the other hand, from the 1940s, studies of what were referred to as “detribalized,” “mixed-blood,” “half-” or “part-caste” Aboriginal communities of southeastern and “settled” Australia were perforce less focused on precolonial tradition, although the anthropologists were trained to look for and to describe vestiges of traditional culture (kinship and social classification, magical practices, and so on). Writers dealing with these communities wrote about social and cultural transformation under conditions of racially based exclusion in such locations as New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria (Barwick 1962, 1963; Bell 1961, 1964, 1965; Berndt and Berndt 1951; Calley 1956, 1957; Gale 1972; Kelly 1943, Reay 1945;Reay and Sitlington 1947;Fink 1957;Beckett 1958,1965a,1965b;see also the well-known Elkin 1951). Nevertheless, little of this literature came to be known outside Australia, and it was seen (even by some of its authors; see Reay 1964:377) as more social historical than anthropological in character. There finally came pressing recommendations by anthropologists concerning the importance of attempting to conceptualize and somehow study change (Berndt 1982), rather than attempting to reconstruct traditional cultural systems from the memory accounts of aging informants. However, many anthropologists and much of the general public continued in a view in which notions of traditional Aboriginal culture occupied a privileged position as originary and clearly distinct from the culture(s) of mainstream Australia. For more recent ethnographies dealing with change, see Collman’s (1988) discussion of the effect of welfare bureaucracy upon...