Academy Fellow

Emeritus Professor Peggy Brock AM, ASSA, Historian

Peggy Brock, who died 30 May in North Adelaide, aged 75, was an eminent historian of Australian and global history. She is best known for her collaborative work on Indigenous people of Australasia and the Pacific. Her first book set the pattern for a career marked by close collaboration with living people. She used written archival sources to back up and supplement the stories and memories related to her by Adnyamathanha elders. The product was Yura and Udnyu: A History of the Adnyamathanha of the North Flinders Ranges (1985), the first book on Aboriginal history published by South Australia’s Wakefield Press.

This led to another collaboration, this time with Doreen Kartinyeri on the tragic history of Poonindie, an Anglican mission near Port Lincoln. Poonindie: The Rise and Destruction of an Aboriginal Community tells how people gathered from diverse places became successful farmers. When European settlers complained that the land was ‘too good for blackfellas’, an act of parliament broke up the mission, which was then sold off to white farmers.

Increasingly aware of how women’s cultural knowledge had been ignored, she produced her groundbreaking book, Women, Rites and Sites: The Status of Aboriginal Women's Cultural Knowledge (1989). During her decade with the S.A. government Aboriginal Heritage Unit, Peggy enrolled for a PhD in History at the University of Adelaide. Her 1992 dissertation was subsequently published by Cambridge University Press as Outback Ghetto. A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival (1993). The book showed how people forced onto missions and government reserves used their initiative to achieve positive educational, social and economic outcomes.

After her appointment as a lecturer at Edith Cowan University in 1991, Peggy developed her work on missions, insisting that indigenous Christianity be taken seriously and not dismissed as a European imposition. She extended her horizons to other parts of the British Commonwealth, most notably with her award-winning work on the 19th-century Native Canadian diarist, Arthur Wellington Clah. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences in 2005, promoted to Professor of Colonial and Indigenous History, and appointed a Member of the Order of Australia. Following her retirement back to Adelaide she oversaw the production of Colonialism and its Aftermath: An Aboriginal History of South Australia with Tom Gara (2017).

For all her high academic achievements, she remembered her happiest research experiences as camping out with Adnyamathanha women of the North Flinders Ranges.

She is survived by her husband, Emeritus Professor Norman Etherington AM, son Ben, Associate Professor of English at Western Sydney University, son Nathan, an architect who recently joined the faculty at the University Technology Sydney, and granddaughters Scarlett and Harriet.

*Written by Emeritus Professor Norman Etherington

• P. Brock, ‘Moveable Feasts: Chronicles of “Potlatching” Among the Tsimshian, 1860s-1900s’ Ethnohistory 59(2): 387-405, 2012.
• P.Brock (2011) The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast Vancouver: UBC Press.
• P. Brock (2010) ‘An Indigenous View of Missionaries: Arthur Wellington Clah and Missionaries on the Northwest Coast of Canada’ in A. May and P. Grimshaw (eds) Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 67-80.
• P. Brock (2008) ‘Missionaries as Newcomers; A comparative study of the Northwest Pacific coast and Central Australia’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 19 (2).
• P. Brock (2008) Two-way food: bush tucker and Whitefella food, Journal of Australian Studies 32(1).
• P. Brock (2007) Nakedness and clothing in early encounters between Aboriginal people of central Australia, missionaries and anthropologists, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.
• P. Brock (2005) New Christians as evangelists, In Missions and Colonialism. N. Etherington (ed.). Oxford: OUP.
• P. Brock (ed) (2005) Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
• P. Brock (2004) Skirmishes in Aboriginal History, Aboriginal History 28.
• P. Brock (ed) (2001) Words and Silences. Aboriginal Women, Politics and Land Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
• P. Brock (1991) Outback Ghettos. A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993 [Reprinted 2009].