Reconstructing Aboriginal History and Cultural Identity through Self Narrative: A Study of Ruby Langford’s Autobiography Don‘t Take Your Love to Town

The last decades of previous century has witnessed the burgeoning of life narratives lending voice to the oppressed, dispossessed, and the colonized marginalities of race, class or gender across the world. A large number of autobiographical and biographical narratives that have appeared on the literary scene have started articulating their ordeals and their struggle for survival. The Aboriginals in Australia have started candidly articulating their side of story, exposing the harassment and oppression of their people in Australia. These oppressed communities find themselves sandwiched and strangled under the mainstream politics of multiculturalism, assimilation and secularism. The present paper seeks to analyze how life writing serves the purpose of history in celebrated Australian novelist, Aboriginal historian and social activist Ruby Langford’s autobiographical narrative, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. The Colonial historiography of Australian settlement has never accepted the fact of displacement and eviction of the Aboriginals from their land and culture. The whites systematically transplanted Anglo-Celtic culture and identity in the land of Australia which was belonged to the indigenous for centuries. Don’t Take Your Love to Town reconstructs the debate on history of the colonial settlement and status of Aboriginals under subsequent government policies like reconciliation, assimilation and multiculturalism. The paper is an attempt to gaze the assimilation policy adopted by the state to bring the Aboriginals into the mainstream politics and society on the one hand, and the regular torture, exploitation and cultural degradation of the Aboriginals recorded in the text on the other. In this respect the paper sees how Langford encounters British history of Australian settlement and the perspectives of Australian state towards the Aboriginals. The politics of mainstream culture, religion, race and ethnicity, which is directly or indirectly responsible for the condition of the Aboriginals, is also the part of discussion in the paper.

Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World

Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World delves deep into the experience of Celtic communities and individuals in the late medieval period through to the modern age. Its thirteen essays range widely, from Scottish soldiers in France in the fifteenth century to Gaelic-speaking communities in rural New South Wales in the twentieth, and expatriate Irish dancers in the twenty-first. Connecting them are the recurring themes of memory and foresight: how have Celtic communities maintained connections to the past while keeping an eye on the future? Chapters explore language loss and preservation in Celtic countries and among Celtic migrant communities, and the influence of Celtic culture on writers such as Dylan Thomas and James Joyce. In Australia, how have Irish, Welsh and Scottish migrants engaged with the politics and culture of their home countries, and how has the idea of a Celtic identity changed over time? Drawing on anthropology, architecture, history, linguistics, literature and philosophy, Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World offers diverse, thought-provoking insights into Celtic culture and identity.

1978 Emerging: a look at some of R. S. Thomas’ more recent poems

A. M. ‘Donald’ Allchin (1930–2010) worked at Pusey House, Oxford, in the 1960s before serving as a Residentiary Canon at Canterbury Cathedral (1973–87). This article reflects his love of the influential poetry of the craggy Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas (1913–2000). Allchin taught himself Welsh by following the daily liturgical readings in Welsh and was fascinated by Celtic culture and ritual and Eastern Orthodoxy, writing a number of devotional books. Editor.

The Celtic Debate

The conventional assumption that the pre-Roman populations of Britain and Ireland were ethnically Celtic, and that Celtic culture survived in the north and west beyond the Roman occupation of Britain, was first challenged in the 1990s in a critical process that has sometimes since been parodied beyond the legitimate questions raised by Celtosceptics. Whilst it is true that the term ‘Celtic’ was only widely applied to speakers of a language group from the eighteenth century, the equation of linguistically Celtic speaking Gauls with Celts of ancient historians still seems archaeologically and linguistically tenable, even if the case for equating Celtic-speaking Britons with ethnic Celts is no more than inference. By the same rationale, Celtic art should refer to the art of people who might reasonably be regarded as ethnic Celts (including those who regarded themselves as Celtiberians), and not just to La Tène art, which is both chronologically and geographically restricted. The case for regarding early Irish Christian art as Celtic is largely specious, except as a product of the ‘Celtic’ church. The case for regarding the origins of the Celts as extending back into earlier prehistory carries conviction, though the further suggestion that these origins lay in South-Western Europe remains far from persuasive to many linguists as well as to archaeologists.

Wales

This chapter argues that the chief features which distinguished Welsh Anglicanism from English in this period were its poverty, its remote position, and its almost entirely rural nature, at least until the rapid expansion of population associated with the Industrial Revolution. It argues that Anglican clergy in Wales in this period were generally Welsh and Welsh-speaking, and that they enjoyed good relations with their Dissenting neighbours until the last decades of the eighteenth century. It compares and contrasts the effects of the two eighteenth-century Evangelical revivals and describes the attempts to educate the poor, especially through circulating schools. Finally, it discusses the leading role played by Anglicans in the romantic revival of Wales’s Celtic culture and traces the hardening of relations with Dissenters, especially in the somewhat wealthier north, from about the 1790s.

The Secret of the Celts Revisited

What makes the Celts so popular today? Anton van Hamel and Joep Leerssen published on the popularity of imagery connected with pre-Christian Celts, Van Hamel seeing the holistic worldview and Leerssen mysteriousness as appealing characteristics. They explain waves of ‘Celtic revival’ that washed over Europe as reaction and romanticising movements that search for alternatives from contemporaneous dominant culture. Each period has produced its modernized versions of the Celtic past. Besides periodical heightened interest in things Celtic, Van Hamel saw a permanent basis of attraction in Celtic texts, which accommodate ‘primitive’ and romantic mentalities. This article also analyses Celtic Christianity (through The Celtic Way by Ian Bradley and The Celtic Way of Prayer by Esther de Waal) on the use of Celtic texts and imagery of Celtic culture. Two case studies are done (on the use of the Old-Irish Deer’s Cry and the description of a nineteenth-century Scottish ritual). Both the current search for ‘spirituality’ and the last wave of ‘Celtic revival’ seem to have sprung from a reaction movement that criticizes dominant religion/culture and seek inspiration and precursors in an idealized past. The roots of this romantic search for a lost paradise are, however, also present in medieval Irish literature itself. Elements such as aesthetics, imaginative worlds and the posited lost beauty of pre-industrial nature and traditional society are keys in explaining the bridges among the gap between ‘us’ and the Celts. The realization that Celtic languages are endangered or dead heightens the feeling of loss because they are the primary gates towards this lost way of (thinking about) life.

Landscape construction and time reckoning in Iron Age Celtic Iberia

In this paper, we report on three areas of the Iberian Peninsula that were occupied at least during the Iron Age and the early stages of Romanisation, where observations of astronomical phenomena in the landscape, rock carvings, and Latin inscriptions point to a particular method of time reckoning. All of these sites have previously been connected with the Celtic culture. The knowledge of the natural world that Classical sources assigned to these peoples need not have been reflected in a monolithic calendrical system used by all Celtic communities on the Continent. In fact, such a ‘Celtic calendar’ may have had different expressions in different areas, expressed in different ways, although sharing some common characteristics such as the particual use of the lunar and solar cycles.