This book explores storytelling as an innovative means of improving understanding of Indigenous people and their histories and struggles including with the law. It uses the Critical Race Theory (‘CRT’) tool of ‘outsider’ or ‘counter’ storytelling to illuminate the practices that have been used by generations of Aboriginal women to create an outlaw culture and to resist their invisibility to law. Legal scholars are yet to use storytelling to bring the experiential knowledge of Aboriginal women to the centre of legal scholarship and yet this book demonstrates how this can be done by way of a new methodology that combines elements of CRT with speculative biography. In one chapter, the author tells the imagined story of Eliza Woree who featured prominently in the backdrop to the decision of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Dempsey v Rigg (1914) but whose voice was erased from the judgements. This accessible book adds a new and innovative dimension to the use of CRT to examine the nexus between race and settler colonialism. It speaks to those interested in Indigenous peoples and the law, Indigenous studies, Indigenous policy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, feminist studies, race and the law, and cultural studies.
Author(s): Nicole Watson
Series: Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 113
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
1 Introduction
Introduction
2 Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Feminism and the Stories of Outsiders
Introduction
Part One: Critical Race Theory
Introduction
Outsider Storytelling
Part Two: Critical Race Feminism
Introduction
Black Women and Outlaw Culture
Part Three: Commonalities Between the United States of America and Australia
Introduction
The Racial Hierarchy
Short-Lived Peaks of Progress
Racism Is Omnipresent
Part Four: Australian CRT Scholarship
Introduction
The Pioneers of Australian CRT
Conclusion
3 Outlaw Women: Emerging from Invisibility to Resistance
Introduction
Part One: Popular Representations of Indigenous Women
Introduction
Indigenous Women in Australian History
Part Two: Indigenous Women’s Outlaw Culture
Introduction
Operating Outside of the Law
Caring for the Most Vulnerable
Part Three: Indigenous Women and Legal Storytelling
Introduction
Absence of Voice
Tuckiar v R
Hales v Jamilmira
Harnessing the Law
Onus v Alcoa
Roach v Electoral Commissioner
Eatock v Bolt
Conclusion
4 Eliza Woree: An Early Pioneer of Outlaw Culture
Introduction
Part One: Eliza’s Childhood
Introduction
Life on the Northern Frontier
Part Two: Eliza’s Adulthood
Introduction
Employment
Marriage
Legal Existence
Part Three: Deportation to Palm Island
Life in Malay Town
The Loss of Freedom
Conclusion
5 Conclusion
