Julie Andrews, Where’s All the Community? Aboriginal Melbourne Revisited, Black Inc., 2026, RRP $36.99.
Book review by Fiona Gatt.
When I was growing up in Melbourne in the late twentieth century, in my south-eastern suburbs bubble, I had absolutely no idea there was a thriving Aboriginal community in Melbourne. These days, regardless of where you live in Melbourne, the city’s Aboriginal community is visible and proud. Meetings everywhere begin with an acknowledgement of Country, and our schoolchildren are taught (at least some basic) local Aboriginal history. Julie Andrews very readable book explains the history behind these realities and the Aboriginal Melbourne that has driven this change.
One of the key questions Andrews addresses is: who is considered a part of Aboriginal Melbourne? She speaks directly to a non-Aboriginal audience, astutely I would argue, tackling common misconceptions, misunderstandings and curious questions. Her central argument speaks to these questions: Aboriginal Melbourne includes families who came to Melbourne for employment, or were there already, and together built and maintained a community there. Being mobile and migrating between urban and regional areas for work and family caring responsibilities has been a central feature of the Aboriginal Melbourne experience. Her own story features as an example while also setting out her personal credentials that, alongside her academic training, allowed her to collect intergenerational oral history of the experience of Aboriginal Melbourne.
Andrews provides a succinct overview of colonial history and the Aboriginal clans of Melbourne who were so swiftly and deliberately evicted from the burgeoning colonial Melbourne city area. The history of Coranderrk (established 1863) and other missions is also given only a light treatment. Yet she provides just enough information to contextualise the importance of this history, to understand her primary focus: explaining Aboriginal Melbourne of the twentieth century which grew out of this world of disconnection from Country and new connections made in the Aboriginal reserves. Here, family history—her own, oral history, and a collective sense of shared experience—reveal the importance of remembering and honouring the destruction and resilience, exclusion and activism that came out of the era of missions and surveillance. Andrews shows us that the Aboriginal Melbourne of the mid-to late twentieth century was one of families and individuals with diverse experiences, yet also common threads of struggle and rupture.
Out of this struggle emerged an amazing series of waves of activism, from the 1930s Australian Aborigines League, through to the 1970s women’s-led organisations that focused on specific practical outcomes for housing, education, the justice system and more. The extent of the history Andrews presents here is more detailed than the section on colonial-era history, though readers would need to consult other publications she refers to for a more complete picture of the prompts, machinations and outcomes of these organisations. Her focus remains on the inside story. We get a tantalising glimpse at the car rides full of women, and young future Aunties like Andrews, as the women planned and shared stories on their way to meetings in Canberra. This is the real strength of this book; it provides an overview of how families had become connected, stay connected and together built a community of pride and activism.
While a decent section of the book thus illuminates the collective lesser-known people behind the acronyms of major Aboriginal organisations of the recent past, Andrews imparts a message to the Aboriginal community today as she explores contemporary challenges. These challenges include: social media; perceptions of Aboriginality; a diaspora spread across the outer suburbs as opposed to the earlier concentration in Fitzroy and inner Melbourne; and the tensions that can arise in deciding who has authority to provide a Welcome to Country. Despite these pressures she argues growing up in Aboriginal Melbourne can instil a sense of belonging. Support of elders and community opens the door to better futures for all. Andrews celebrates the opportunities made available through radio, arts, sport, education and housing while maintaining a clear voice of advocacy in the need to address ongoing disadvantages and challenges.
For non-Aboriginal scholars engaging with the history of Aboriginal Melbourne, Where’s All the Community? offers a provocation to engage with Aboriginal ways of knowing—which Andrews explains is ‘rooted in community knowledge and lived experience’—in concert with the archives written by colonial era white men and later anthropologists like Diane Barwick. Aboriginal knowledge, argues Andrews, must be given a chance to breathe outside of the constraints of colonial and empirical ways of defining and knowing (p.12).
The material for Andrews’s book has been collected and compiled at a critical juncture. Leaders of the earlier chapter of Aboriginal Melbourne, and those who knew even earlier leaders, are passing into the Dreamtime. Andrews writes to record the collective story and to carry on the fight in this new era of Treaty.
Fiona Gatt
