Title: White man got no dreaming :
Authors: Stanner, W. E. H.,
Date: 1979
Publisher: Australian National University Press ;
Physical description: xv, 389 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Language: English
LC classification: G
Abstract: AThis book looks at 'the Aboriginal problem' from an unusual viewpoint - that of the Aborigines themselves, for whom 'the Aboriginal problem' is the white Australian. The essays deal with all those features of traditional Aboriginal life that made it so deeply satisfying to the original Australians: religion, attachment to land, imaginative culture, and the whole ethos on which the impact of Europeans and their way of life has been destructive. The Aborigines have been dispossessed, exploited, rejected and on occasions reviled. What we now offer them is, from an Aboriginal point of view, neither true reconciliation nor equality. The author argues that race relations will deteriorate even farther than the neuralgic point to which our ethnocentric insensibility has already brought them unless white Australians make an effort to comprehend the Aboriginal truths of life.
Contents: The Aborigines -- The Dreaming -- Continuity and change among the Aborigines -- Durmugam: a Nangiomeri -- Religion, Totemism and symbolism -- Caliban discovered -- The history of indifference thus begins' -- Gallery of southern man for Canberra -- After the dreaming -- No, no, Sir James: Polyphemus, not goliath -- The Yirrakala land case: dress rehearsal -- After the Dreaming-whither? -- Aborigines and Australian society -- Land for Aborigines: Mr. Hunt's criticisims examined -- Aborigines in the affluent society: the widening gap.
Notes: Errata slip inserted.
Subject headings (LCSH): Aboriginal Australians--Government relations.; Aboriginal Australians.