Summary

Note: This object includes elements appropriated from First Peoples culture and heritage and stereotypical depictions. Such cultural appropriation and stereotyping is not condoned by Museums Victoria which considers it to be inappropriate, even racist. Historical distance and context do not excuse or erase this fact.

Booklet entitled 'Aboriginal Tribes & Customs', published by the Sanitarium Health Food Company as part of their Sanitarium Children's Library Series, probably during the 1940s. It has 50 colour plates of illustrations, each depicting various aspects of First Peoples culture, with a short explanation describing the subject matter of each illustration. The back cover reproduces Norman Tindale's 1940 'tribal' map of Australia. The text in the album was written by Fred McCarthy, curator of anthropology at the Australian Museum, Sydney.

Physical Description

Booklet comprising of 16 pages (including the cover). The cover has an orange background and text in brown and black and has an image of a man kneeling and working to create a fire.

Significance

The use of First Peoples' cultural heritage, as well as Australian native flora and fauna, became fashionable during the 1940s and 1950s. These practices expressed a growing sense of Australian identity while the nation was experiencing the social upheavals of war and mass migration. The use of First Peoples' imagery in popular culture revealed a desire to reference local cultural heritage and landscape, to appropriate it for symbols of national identity, while simultaneously setting First Peoples culture as being exotic and in the past, rather than complex, diverse, living and contemporary. While attempting to offer an educational tool, the booklet reveals a paternalistic approach to presenting First Peoples' culture without consultation with First Peoples' communities. References to First Peoples' objectify, generalise and offend, and reflect the common belief at the time that 'authentic' First Peoples culture only existed in remote Australia.

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