Abstract
Karen O’Brien, “Social Cohesion and Resilience in First Australian Family and Kinship Networks,” Journal of Family History 42:4 (2017), 440-451, DOI 10.1177/0363199017725347
This article has been corrected to make the revisions described below.
The following author’s acknowledgement has been added:
The author wishes to acknowledge Mykaela Saunders, the author’s student-advisee at the University of Sydney. The author served as dissertation advisor to Ms. Saunders for her 2015 thesis titled “Yarning with Minjungbal women: testimonial narratives of transgenerational trauma and healing explored through relationships with country and culture, community and family.” The author extensively referenced Ms. Saunders’ thesis in writing this article.
While Ms. Saunders’ thesis was included in the references for the article, multiple quoted excerpts from the thesis were not appropriately identified in the original publication of the article. The following references should have been identified as quoted from Mykaela Saunders’ thesis:
p. 446
“In oral histories such as the Minjungbal tradition, the meanings of stories are manifold and the tone of transmission is variable. In this context, stories serve to communicate cultural knowledge, to transmit history, to teach spiritual lore, and also to entertain. [33]”
p. 446-447
“Yarning with Minjungbal women incorporates narratives of five women from the Minjungbal community of Tweed Heads in far northern New South Wales in a combined metanarrative.”
p. 447
“One Minjungbal woman explained that ‘it’s not that we’ve adopted the country, I think the country’s adopted us in a fashion.’” [34]
“‘It’s almost like the land has sung me here. And I’m not going nowhere . . . I love it here. Why would I move when I have it all right here?’” [35]
p. 447
“I can remember my mother helping to set up stalls, and my father’s time consumed by archaeologists and anthropologists when the Tent Embassy was in Fingal.”
p. 447
“Hey, this is your country, you get up. Cos the only way you’re gonna save any cultural heritage here is if you get up and have a say.”
p. 447
“one Minjungbal woman observed in the 1980s, ‘when the Land Council started, I think a lot more of our community got involved, particularly with the issue of Fingal, because that’s an important part of our heritage . . . they were gonna build a resort there . . . and we, the community did get involved in stopping development.’ Another Minjungbal woman agreed that ‘development concerns saw the families and community come together and fight for a common cause. If they didn’t, they would have been forced out of their homes’”.
p. 448
“Queensland Main Roads work planned a bypass to avoid Tugan from the Gold Coast Highway due to traffic congestion problems, and they proposed to build a new stretch of highway at the back of the Gold Coast airport.”
p. 448
“One Minjungbal woman said that ‘we had our concerns about the burials there, we know they were disturbed in the past,’ and so ‘we wanted to prove to them, that this was a unique site, as told to us by our old people and as recorded by the early explorers.’”41
“Development consultation with the women was inadequate and was ultimately dismissive of the importance of the place. ‘We were not believed,’ said one Minjungbal woman; however, ‘we knew different, we knew what our Old People had told us, and the proof is in the excavation reports.’”[42]
“Despite protests and lengthy court battles, the project went ahead.”
p.448
“She stated ‘we had our ways of walking through the scrub here, meandering through our tracks and getting in there, to check on the condition of cultural sites . . . and to check that everything was in order there and there was no damage occurring.’”[43]
“However, due to the completion of the Tugun bypass, today ‘you’d be prosecuted if you get in there,’ and so ‘they’ve essentially stopped thousands of years of continuing access into there.’”[44]
“Furthermore, tens of thousands of artifacts from the area have been moved off Country and are now housed in shipping containers indefinitely.”