Old Man Fog : And the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point

In far northeastern Australia lies Barrow Point, a now deserted promontory that once was the homeland of several groups of seminomadic Aborigines. Central to the lives and culture of the Barrow Point people was a series of myths about Old Man Fog, a wandering trickster-hero whose adventures created the physical landmarks and moral boundaries of their world. But as the early decades of the twentieth century brought the full force of European colonization to the region, the stories of Fog receded into the fragmented memories of a diminishing, increasingly dispersed Aboriginal population. Camps were relocated, women abducted, and mixed-race children put into mission schools, where English and Christianity replaced their traditional languages and cultures. In 1979 Roger Hart, who had been taken to the Cape Bedford Lutheran mission in 1923 at the age of seven, asked anthropologist John B. Haviland to help him record his native language before it disappeared. He believed himself to be the last surviving member of the Barrow Point people. Their project soon expanded into an effort to preserve not only Hart's language and memories but also the culture of his ancestors. Weaving together Roger Hart's childhood recollections, the myths of Old Man Fog, and excerpts from government and missionary records, Haviland reconstructs the rich, complicated history of the Barrow Point people during the period when traditional Aboriginal life was being systematically dismantled. Through Hart stories, Haviland details the social relations, resources, foods, and seasonal travels of the early twentieth-century Barrow Point people and describes the traumatic effects of colonization of individuallives. Illustrated in full color with striking acrylic paintings that depict the mythical adventures of Fog and the childhood stories of Hart, Old Man Fog and the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point explores the fluid boundaries of memory and history, the role of language and ethnicity in Aboriginal Australian identity, and the ongoing consequences of colonial imperatives in the reorganization of aboriginal societies worldwide.