Dr Alison Holland's new book, Just Relations, charts the life and work of one of Australia’s leading twentieth century human rights advocates. It recovers the efforts of Mary Bennett (1881-1961) to found a ‘just relationship’ between Aborigines and non-Aborigines in Australia from the late 1920s, when the possibility of Aboriginal human rights was first mooted on the international stage, to the 1960s, when an attempt was made to have the Aboriginal question raised before the United Nations.
By placing Bennett’s biography in the context of her humanitarianism - her crusade - Dr Holland reveals the ethics of care, as well as the tensions, contradictions and investments at the heart of humanitarian intervention. Along the way, she shows the forces and ideas which shaped Bennett’s advocacy and the wider context within which her story and her efforts took shape. In demonstrating the close connection between humanitarianism as a political project and the rise of human rights, Holland tells an important chapter in the little known history of human rights in Australia.
According to Dr Holland, the book started with her efforts to retrieve Bennett’s papers. She says, "I never found a single collection. Rather I found threads in archives around Australia and England, particularly in the papers of fellow humanitarians and advocates for Aboriginal rights. This thread and the tussle over her papers revealed an important part of her story. Bennett’s articulation of the need for humane intervention in the lives of Aboriginal people was not hers alone but one she shared with others across the middle years of the twentieth century."
Dr Allison Holland, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University's Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, has published widely on issues of Aboriginal and feminist history, as well as a related interest in citizenship, in a range of national and international journals and books, and is co-editor of Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter. In 2013/14 she won the Frederick Watson Fellowship at the National Archives of Australia where she focused on Aboriginal policy and governance in the Northern Territory between 1930 and 1950.
By placing Bennett’s biography in the context of her humanitarianism - her crusade - Dr Holland reveals the ethics of care, as well as the tensions, contradictions and investments at the heart of humanitarian intervention. Along the way, she shows the forces and ideas which shaped Bennett’s advocacy and the wider context within which her story and her efforts took shape. In demonstrating the close connection between humanitarianism as a political project and the rise of human rights, Holland tells an important chapter in the little known history of human rights in Australia.
According to Dr Holland, the book started with her efforts to retrieve Bennett’s papers. She says, "I never found a single collection. Rather I found threads in archives around Australia and England, particularly in the papers of fellow humanitarians and advocates for Aboriginal rights. This thread and the tussle over her papers revealed an important part of her story. Bennett’s articulation of the need for humane intervention in the lives of Aboriginal people was not hers alone but one she shared with others across the middle years of the twentieth century."
Dr Allison Holland, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University's Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, has published widely on issues of Aboriginal and feminist history, as well as a related interest in citizenship, in a range of national and international journals and books, and is co-editor of Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter. In 2013/14 she won the Frederick Watson Fellowship at the National Archives of Australia where she focused on Aboriginal policy and governance in the Northern Territory between 1930 and 1950.
