Avid Reader, Brisbane
Jackie Huggins and Aileen Moreton-Robinson in conversation
Join Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Dr Jackie Huggins at Avid Reader for Talkin' Up to the White Woman and Sister Girl: A conversation.
This event is in-store and live-streamed on Zoom. In-store tickets are $15, Zoom $5.
In this ground-breaking book, Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson undertakes a compelling analysis of the whiteness of Australian feminism and its effects on Indigenous women. From an Indigenous woman’s standpoint, as a Goenpul woman and an academic, she ‘talks up’, engages with and interrogates western feminism in representation and practice.
Through examining an extensive range of feminist literature written mainly by white scholars and activists, Moreton-Robinson shows how whiteness dominates from a position of power and privilege as an invisible norm and unchallenged practice. She illustrates the ways in which Indigenous women have been represented in the publications and teachings of white Australian women, revealing that such renderings of Indigenous lives contrast with how Indigenous women re/present and understand themselves.
Persuasive and engaging, this book is a necessary argument for the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in the teachings and practices that impact on Australian society. This new edition proves the continued relevance of this classic work as a critique of the whiteness of western feminism.
The pieces in this seminal collection represent almost four decades of writing by historian and activist Jackie Huggins. These essays, speeches and interviews combine both the public and the personal in a bold trajectory tracing one Murri woman’s journey towards self-discovery and human understanding. As a widely respected cultural educator and analyst, Huggins offers an Aboriginal view of the history, values and struggles of Indigenous people.
Sister Girl reflects on many important and timely topics, including identity, activism, leadership and reconciliation. It challenges accepted notions of the appropriateness of mainstream feminism in Aboriginal society and of white historians writing Indigenous history. Jackie Huggins’ words, then and now, offer wisdom, urgency and hope.
Dr Jackie Huggins AM FAHA, a member of the Bidjara and Birri Gubba Juru peoples, is currently leading the work for Treaty/Treaties in Queensland. In popular demand as a speaker on Aboriginal issues, she is a well-known historian and author, with articles published widely in Australia and internationally. Her acclaimed biography of her mother, Auntie Rita, was published in 1994. Keeping it in the family, in 2022 her biography of her father, Jack of Hearts: QX11594 was recently published.
She was the former Co-Chair National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, former member of the National Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Co-Chair Reconciliation Australia, the State Library Board of Queensland and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. She was Co-Commissioner for Queensland for the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, and for several years was a Judge of the annual David Unaipon Award.
