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Against the Grain. Colonialism and the Demise of the Bunya Gatherings, 1839 – 1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

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Extract

The white man dropped from the sun bright sky

For he envied the blackfellows' land,

With greed and revenge in his restless eye

And disease and death in his hand.

And he grasped the forest, and seized the strand

And claimed the blue mountains high…

Songs of the Carobra (1855)

You literally could not kill an Aborigine with an axe.

Toowoomba Chronicle (1919)

Idyllic accounts of South-East Queensland's triennial bunya festivals - invariably written by Europeans - seem to float like beckoning mirages above a relative historiographical desert.' The story of the bunya gatherings in the coastal Blackall Ranges or in the Bunya Mountains, at the north-eastern periphery of the Darling Downs, is largely cut adrift from the intricate race relations history of these districts, its aura of ‘romantic reminiscence’ conveniently unsullied by surrounding patterns of colonialism, racism and violence which punctuate the extended process of European intrusion and displacement.

Type
Special Issue: On The Bunya Trail
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

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References

Notes

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