ABSTRACT
Our Lives, Our History, Alice Springs, Australia: IAD Press, 1995 The books reviewed here-a necessarily selective and hardly comprehensive list-are intended to provide multiple points of entry for readers wishing to pursue work concerned with Australian Aboriginal women, and readers should note that much excellent material in the area appears in essays, journal articles, book chapters, and primary sources beyond the scope of this survey. Until relatively recently, Aboriginal women neither appeared in print representing their own experiences and perspectives, nor did women’s lives and business preoccupy the standard works of anthropology and ethnography that dominated twentieth-century European knowledge of Aboriginal peoples and cultures. Aboriginal women have thus historically been subject to a double silence, or absence, from the written record for much of the time from European invasion
in the eighteenth century to the present. Since the late 1970s, however, there has been a steadily developing body of work that redresses this imbalance; most important are the contributions made by Aboriginal women themselves in the increasingly flourishing genres of biography, autobiography, life-writing, and oral history.
