Professor Gillian Cowlishaw

I had travelled, married and was a mother before coming to Sydney University in the 1970s and taking a PhD in anthropology. I taught at Charles Sturt University, the ANU, and Sydney University.
My first research in southern Arnhem Land in 1975 and 1976 later led to the publication of a historical ethnography of the remote community of Bulman: Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: racial power and intimacy in north Australia. (Allen and Unwin with Michigan University Press 1999). Between the first field work and that book I became interested in NSW Aboriginal communities and my first and third books were based on research in the notorious country town of Bourke. These were Black, White or Brindle (Cambridge University Press 1988) and Blackfellas, whitefellas and the hidden injuries of race(Blackwell 2004). Most of my published work is based on interpreting ethnographic accounts of the relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians in contemporary Australia and in the past. Thus I have developed frameworks for understanding racial and cultural identities and their interactions and transformations.
Since 1990 I have been conducting field work in western Sydney

Selected Books

1997 Edited with Dr. B. Morris Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ society. Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press.

1999 Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: racial power and intimacy in north Australia. Sydney and Michigan. Allen and Unwin with Michigan University Press.

2004 Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

2006 Co-editor. Moving Anthropology: critical Indigenous Studies Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press. (with T. Lea and E. Kowal).

2009 The City’s Outback. Sydney, UNSW Press

Recent Articles

2012 Culture and the absurd: the means and meanings of Aboriginal identity in the time of cultural revivalism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society. JRAI (N.S.) 18(2): 397-417

2012 Locating an Australia-wide Anthropology. Co-authored with Lorraine Gibson. Introduction to Special Issue of Oceania. (co-edited by Gibson and Cowlishaw) Vol. 82 (1): 4-14

2012 Reproducing Criminality; how cure can enhance cause. In Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. Eds, K. Carrington, M. Ball, E. O-Brien, J.Tauri. Brisbane, Palgrave Macmillan

2011 Mythologising Culture Part 2: disturbing Aboriginality in the suburbs. The Australian Journal of Anthropology. Vol 21 (2). 170-188

2010 Faulty Tours: a study of Australian tourists. In: ‘Indigenous Tourism, Performance, and Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Pacific’ Special issue of La Ricerca Folkorica 61. co-edited by Professor Franca Tamisari, Dr Anke Tonneer & Eric Venbrux. Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia. Pp.11-19

2003 ‘Disappointing Indigenous People’ Public Culture Vol 15(1): 103-125

2001 ‘Performing Aboriginality: The politics and poetics of citizenship in everyday life’ : UTS Review Vol 7 (1).

2000 Black modernity and bureaucratic culture. Aboriginal Studies Journal Canberra.