The 'Myths' of Ngalakan History: Ideology and Images of the Past in Northern Australia

‘Narratives of Survival in the Post‐Colonial North’

“…Pursuing a variant deconstruction of the 'myth-history' opposition, Morphy and Morphy (1984) take a Barthean (1973) perspective. This does not take as primary some notion of opposition between a category of narrative of 'concrete events' versus one epitomizing cultural structure, but seeks to locate a common ground between them in the historicity of myth.…”

“…In examining narratives of the colonial period from Ngalakan people of the Roper river in the Northern Territory, Morphy and Morphy (1984) observe that, despite a fifty-year period of intense frontier conflict and frequently violent settler-Aboriginal interaction, in only one account was there reference to whites causing the death of a named (that is, specific) Aborigine -and even in this account, the death was most directly attributed to a crocodile who bit a woman fleeing from unknown whites, rather than to them.…”

History in Anthropology

“…They were putting those differences to determi nate, though variable and perhaps contradictory, use from one place and time to another. Primitives-the term itself was coming under question�were ma ture rhetoricians after all, just like their "civilized" others (2,15,30,79,84,89). Rosaldo (92) and Price (85) established that at least some of them were also mature historians, that they had their ways of representing and interpre ting and also of verifying their representations of the course and content of events.…”

Language maintenance: why bother?

“…This phenomenon is related to what Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) call 'Invented Tradition'; a set of practices which automatically implies continuity with the past, in fact, where possible, 'they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past' (1983). Spitzer (1974: 120) describing the creoles of Sierra Leone, talks of similar phenomenon which he calls 'defensive Africanization', in which the people search back in history and, 'through a filter dictated by their current needs and expectations, seek evidence of great deeds and glories' (for an Australian example see Morphy and Morphy 1984). This phenomenon is known to oral-historians (Price 1980) who realize that a person's own account of their past or of their group's past 'can be interpreted to yield etic conclusions in ways doubtless quite alien to the original "intentions" of the authors' whose 'intentions' may have been 'purposes of Propaganda and of factional or individual glorification' (1980: 159).…”