Focusing on the Past

Before the first contact with Europeans, Aboriginal people in Australia had a consistent mode of production coupled with enormous variation in most other aspects of society. Through more than a hundred years of research, however, scholars have constructed a collective ethnographical entity called the ‘Australian Aborigine’ (Attwood 1989; Reece 1987). This construct first relied on ideas of race and racist doctrines formulated in the nineteenth century (see Stocking 1968); more recently, prehistoric archaeology and material culture studies have supplied the necessary technological evidence.