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Stephen Muecke BA (Hons, Monash), Mes.L (Paris), PhD (UWA) FAHA is Emeritus Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, Australia and Adjunct Professor at the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Broome. [1] He studied linguistics and semiotics, completing his PhD on storytelling techniques among Aboriginal people in Broome, Western Australia.
Muecke's PhD research resulted in Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1983. The storyteller was Indigenous leader Paddy Roe (OAM). They later collaborated on the prizewinning Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle, 1984) with landscape painter Krim Benterrak, a postmodern ethnography of Roebuck Plains, near Broome. A recent book with Paddy Roe is The Children's Country: The Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia (2020). In 1993 Muecke became the first Professor of Cultural Studies in Australia, at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he worked from 1985 to 2009.
Muecke is a significant proponent of fictocritical writing, the travelogue No Road (bitumen all the way) (Fremantle 1997) being the first Australian monograph in this genre; a later collection is Joe in the Andamans and Other Fictocritical Stories (Local Consumption, 2008). Both books were shortlisted for major literary prizes.
With Adam Shoemaker he edited the writings of David Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (Melbourne University Press, 2001), and co-edited with Jack Davis and Mudrooroo Narogin the first anthology of Black Australian writings, Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings, (University of QLD Press, 1990). He identified that the book Myths and Legends of the Aborigines by William Ramsay Smith was actually mainly written by Unaipon. [2] Again with Adam Shoemaker, he co-authored a book about Aboriginal Australians entitled Les Aborigènes d'Australie (2002), which was published in the French collection “Découvertes Gallimard”. [3] The English edition, Aboriginal Australians: First Nations of an Ancient Continent, appeared in 2004, published by Thames & Hudson. [4]
Cultural Studies research on the Indian Ocean from 2000 has led to Cultures of Trade, edited with Devleena Ghosh (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), and a collaborative work with the photographer Max Pam, Contingency in Madagascar (Intellect, 2012).
Muecke was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998. [5]
Muecke is a descendant of pioneering Germans in the Barossa Valley and Adelaide, and he is the father of three sons, Joe, Hugo and Sebastian with his partner Prudence Black. They live in Adelaide and Sydney, Australia. His sister, Frances Muecke, is a retired classicist at the University of Sydney.
The University of Notre Dame Australia is a private Roman Catholic university in Australia with campuses in Perth and Broome in Western Australia and Sydney in New South Wales. Its campuses are notable for its restored late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian-style architecture, most of which is ubiquitous in Fremantle's West End heritage area as a university town. The university was established by an act of the Parliament of Western Australia in 1989.
David Ngunaitponi, known as David Unaipon, was an Aboriginal Australian preacher, inventor, and author. A Ngarrindjeri man, his contribution to Australian society helped to break many stereotypes of Aboriginal people, and he is featured on the Australian $50 note in commemoration of his work. He was the son of preacher and writer James Unaipon.
Jack Leonard Davis was an Australian 20th-century Aboriginal playwright, poet and Aboriginal Australian activist.
NAIDOC Week is an Australian observance lasting from the first Sunday in July until the following Sunday. The acronym NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines' and Islanders' Day Observance Committee. NAIDOC Week has its roots in the 1938 Day of Mourning, becoming a week-long event in 1975.
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), established as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1964, is an independent Australian Government statutory authority. It is a collecting, publishing, and research institute and is considered to be Australia's premier resource for information about the cultures and societies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Fictocriticism is a postmodern style of writing which can be described as "Gonzo [in reference to the journalism style] Anthropology". Blending fact and fiction, ethnographic observation, archival history, literary theory and memoir.
David George Nash is a prominent Australian field linguist, specialising in the Aboriginal languages of Australia. Brought up in Parkes, New South Wales, he received a BA in pure mathematics from the Australian National University followed by an M.A. in Linguistics. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied with Ken Hale and received his PhD in linguistics in 1980. Before returning to Australia, he worked on the Lexicon Project at MIT. In 2005 he was Ken Hale Professor at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute. He works as a consultant for various Aboriginal organisations. He is also a Visiting Fellow of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
The history of Indigenous Australians began at least 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continental landmasses. This article covers the history of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, two broadly defined groups which each include other sub-groups defined by language and culture.
William Ramsay Smith, frequently referred to as Ramsay Smith, was a Scottish physician, educator, naturalist, anthropologist and civil servant, who worked in South Australia after moving there at the age of about 37 in 1896. He was initially appointed as a pathologist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and was later appointed to other roles, including that of city coroner in Adelaide, but his legacy has been marred by allegations of misuse of human remains. He made a study of Aboriginal Australians, and sent body parts to Edinburgh University's anthropological collection. He published a number of books and articles in scientific journals, and in 1930 published a work under his own name which was later found to be the work of Ngarrindjeri Elder David Unaipon.
The Aboriginal Advancement League was founded in 1957 as the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League (VAAL), is the oldest Aboriginal rights organisation in Australia still in operation. Its precursor organisations were the Australian Aborigines League and Save the Aborigines Committee, and it was also formerly known as Aborigines Advancement League (Victoria), and just Aborigines Advancement League.
Colin Thomas Johnson, better known by his nom de plume Mudrooroo, was an Australian novelist, poet, essayist and playwright. His many works are centred on Aboriginal Australian characters and topics; however, there was some doubt cast upon his claims to have Aboriginal ancestry.
Clarence Frederick "Clarrie" Isaacs, also known as Yaluritja and Ishak Mohamad Haj, was an Aboriginal Australian activist.
Donald Robert Stuart was an Australian novelist whose works include stories with Aboriginal backgrounds, and a series recounting his experience as a prisoner of war in Burma in World War II.
Many poets and novelists and specialised writers have written about the Australian outback from first-hand experience. These works frequently address race relations in Australia, often from a personal point of view, with Australian Aboriginal people used as a theme or subject.
Paddy Roe, also known as Lulu was an Aboriginal Elder of the Goolarabooloo tribe of the Nyigina ethnic group in Australia. He was an author who won the Western Australian Week Literary Award in 1985, and was short-listed for the National Book Council Award in 1983, and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award in 1985. He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 1990 Australia Day Honours for "service to Aboriginal welfare". He has collaborated on works such as Gularabulu, Stories from the West Kimberley and others.
Jimmy Pike (c1940-2002) was a Walmatjarri Aboriginal artist.
Roebuck Plains Station is a pastoral lease that is located close to the township of Broome in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is one of the closest pastoral leases to Broome.
Adam Maximilian Shoemaker is a Canadian-Australian academic and higher education administrator, and a scholarly authority within the field of Indigenous Australian literature. He currently serves as Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University.
Sylvia Kanytjupai Ken is an Aboriginal Australian Artist. Her painting Seven Sisters won the 2019 Wynne Prize awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Yued is a region inhabited by the Yued people, one of the fourteen groups of Noongar Aboriginal Australians who have lived in the South West corner of Western Australia for approximately 40,000 years.
