ABSTRACT
Recent historical writing about the Aboriginal Embassy has either been partisan or prescriptive. Those on the partisan side have been focused on oral sources while others covet a definitive historical perspective (e.g. Taffe 2005: 270–276; see also Read 1990: 129, 141–149). Both points of view, however, lock out the prospect of more theoretic ways of looking at the Aboriginal past. Aborigines do have a history and were conscious of their state of sensibility towards European arrival. However, it took some time for both political consciousness and nationalism to emerge. 1 Australian academic historians have, to some extent, left this history to antiquarians and anthropologists who have imposed upon Aborigines policies such as protectionism, assimilation, solutions to ‘the half-caste problem’ and the plunder of Aboriginal material culture. This theft of material culture has been stored away by governments (State and Federal) who monopolized the anthropological discipline’s academic pursuits (Griffith 1996). 2 Out of this milieu has come the destruction of Aboriginal society where the past is now built on positivism, ideology, propaganda and mythology. 3
