A deeply engaging read (although disappointing to find it 11 years after publication, in what feels like a new world). It's an academic work, with a lot of assumptions about readers' knowledge with regard to recent Australian history and theories of sociology, civil service, and community, but worth plugging away at.

At the heart of the challenge of Indigenous Australians seems to be the issue of number. That is, they make up at most 2.5% of the population. Inevitably, this means they will never have electoral power or financial power. And when 2.5% is divided amongst all of the different views people hold in this world, it makes it very hard for them to gain critical mass in any debate either.

Sarah Maddison sensitively teases out many of the strands that cause the current, seemingly endless stalemate in Australian racial politics. The history of white decision-making, the deeply-wrought issues with mainstream policy in this area, and the challenges that Aboriginal communities and leaders face themselves. It should be noted that, although Maddison does look at cultural challenges within Aboriginal communities, the focus of the book is on their communal struggle, the complexity of life for what remains of a complex chain of Indigenous cultures in a post-colonial world. Maddison also looks inside ideas of Aboriginal kinship, social connection, the "hybrid identity" of being from a collectivist group inside an individualist broader society. There were some areas of discussion regarding disputes within Indigenous communities that I would have liked to see more of, but we can't have everything.

On the negative side, I would have asked Maddison to put her references in either footnotes or endnotes. Her pages are clogged up with in-line citations like a first year undergraduate, and this makes the book look unattractive as well as, no doubt, seeming daunting to readers not familiar with the conventions of academia.

On the positive side, one can't help but admire Maddison's calm, rational examination of some of the issues which have been simplified and weaponised by the media. Chapter 3, for instance, examines what Aboriginal people mean when they say "sovereignty". To some young radicals in Australia this is used as a war-cry, as if to deny the right of non-Indigenous Australians to buy or sell land. To a disconcerting number of social conservatives, "Aboriginal sovereignty" is trumpeted on Sky News and social media websites as an affront to basic human rights of white people. In reality, Maddison discovers that it is a word used with complex meanings, usually in a less formal way than it would be understood in an international legal context yet at the same time very powerfully in what it indicates about the mainstream Indigenous view that sovereignty of the land was never ceded. Already here the water is murky. People on all sides are making noise about where Indigenous people stand on a spectrum between "citizen solely of the Commonwealth of Australia" and "citizens solely of their own Indigenous nation". Maddison attempts to encourage all points of view, while reaching a broad conclusion without being trapped by certainty. And that is just one of many examples in which she achieves this.

Ultimately, Maddison asks, why do "we" (the Australian non-Indigenous majority) keep implementing policies that don't succeed or, often enough, even make things worse? Why has public support for Indigenous self-determination seemingly decreased from its high point during the Whitlam era? And if we - like all good enlightened people in the 21st century - believe that Indigenous communities must be given the tools to redevelop their culture, take leadership roles in their own futures, and be judged on their own terms rather than those of their colonisers, why don't our governments act like they believe it? ( )

From http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=582

Sarah Maddison is a non-Indigenous Australian academic. Over five years, she interviewed 30 Aboriginal leaders, activists and public intellectuals, 'discussing their life histories, their political views, their worries and their aspirations'. Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Michael Mansell declined to be interviewed, but the actual cast of characters is very impressive, ranging over all mainland states and including household names as well as people who work at the community level, far from the limelight.

Starting from these interviews and drawing on very wide reading (the bibliography runs to 30 pages), while 'privileging' the voices of the interviewed and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait people (emphatically including the three who declined to be interviewed), Maddison constructs a kind of map, mainly for whitefella readers, of the complexity of Aboriginal politics.

Maddison gives a lightning-quick survey of the history of government policy (violent dispossession, 'protection', 'assimilation', 'self-determination', 'intervention') and Aboriginal responses from the beginnings of the colonies, but the book is about living politics, and so deals mainly with the Howard years and their dark shadow, in which we still live. While there is some attention to personalities – Noel Pearson, for example, emerges as a man most people love to hate, or at least contend with – our attention is drawn to ten 'key areas of tension':

Autonomy and dependency

Sovereignty and citizenship

Tradition and development

Individualism and collectivism

Indigeneity and hybridity

Unity and regionalism

Community and kin

Elders and the next generation

Men, women and customary law

Mourning and reconciliation

The author doesn't keep her own mind out of the telling. She has struggled to do more than simply present the variety of Aboriginal viewpoints, which might have been useful to dip into but very hard to read. In general she has done a hugely impressive job of shaping her vast material into a narrative / argument. Occasionally there's a sentence that strikes a chill. For example, when one reads, 'What is almost universally rejected by Aboriginal leaders and activists, however, is the use of customary law to defend violent and abusive behaviour, particularly that directed at women and children,' one does wonder what unspoken murk hides behind that 'almost'. And, as the endnotes acknowledge, some complexities are simply not discussed – Torres Strait Islanders are generally not present, for instance. But a book that tackled this subject and didn't have loose threads or unaddressed areas would be a miracle, and very very big.

I heard Sarah Maddison on Radio National saying that she wrote this book largely because of her love for Australia. Though this statement may have been in part a preemptive defence against imagined attacks from the weirdly patriotic right, on the evidence of the book itself it was also the plain truth. The book is the labour of an engaged, committed mind, and I for one am grateful for it. ( )