Abstract
Aboriginal violence has been an issue of major political and public health concern in Australia for some four decades and rates of interpersonal and self-violence are now substantially higher than for the wider national population. Despite research and interventions targeting putative proximal factors there has been little improvement and the situation, particularly across remote Aboriginal Australia, remains grim. In the contested arena of Indigenous affairs the representation of violence and of those involved has powerful political resonances. Constructions in the academic and lay press over the last two decades which foreground ‘tradition’ as cause or major contributor provide the frame for this paper which commences by revisiting an historical analysis of violence in remote Indigenous populations undertaken some two decades ago by the first author. Change over the ensuing decades is presented and the implications for current understandings and approaches considered.
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Hunter, E., Onnis, LA. (2015). ‘This Is Where a Seed Is Sown’: Aboriginal Violence – Continuities or Contexts?. In: Lindert, J., Levav, I. (eds) Violence and Mental Health. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8999-8_11
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