Ronald and Catherine Berndt were Australian anthropology's most well-known and prolific practitioners in the period after AP Elkin - a period from about 1950 until their respective deaths in 1990 and 1994. The two met in Elkin's rooms in April 1940 and married the following year. Their intellectual and personal debt to Elkin was enormous, which they recognised. But it was also a burden, one that they attempted to shake off for the rest of their professional lives. This paper, by focusing on Ronald and Catherine Berndt, examines the role of patronage in the academy as a way of elucidating the formation and shaping of the discipline of anthropology in Australian universities in the period 1940 to 1956, the year when Ronald Berndt obtained a position as senior lecturer in anthropology in the University of Western Australia. During this period Elkin, Professor of anthropology, managed to obtain research funding for the Berndts, occasional employment in the Sydney Department of Anthropology as well as sending them to the London School of Economics to do their PhDs, and finally obtaining a position for Ronald as lecturer in the University of Sydney. HD Skinner at Otago (New Zealand) promoted Catherine and it was he who encouraged her to attend Sydney. Due to University regulations she was unable to obtain a tenured position. Professional anthropology in Australia had such a small base that a patron like Elkin was critical to success. The Berndts were not the brightest and best of Elkin's students - a fact acknowledged by Elkin - yet they went on to accept his mantle as the authorities on all matters to do with Aboriginal Australia and Aboriginal Studies. Academic brilliance does not necessarily secure a position and/or success in the academy, a fact Elkin had observed earlier: 'anthropological field work in Australia does not demand brilliance in examinations'.

Data from the Daly River Mission baptismal register maintained from 1888 to 1901 are used to study patterns of Aboriginal fertility at the time of European contact. It is concluded that Aboriginal fertility was high, but so was the mortality rate of infants and small children, which eventually resulted in small family sizes.

The issues of the equal rights deserved by Aboriginals but its deprivation due to colonization and urbanization are discussed in relation to Koorie photographs in Melbourne during the era of ‘high assimilation’ from the late 1930s to 1970. The importance of the photographic genre in the formation of a vernacular modernism is explored by highlighting the gap between the rhetoric of assimilation policies and the reality of Koorie life and society at a time when relations between Koories and the wider community were often starkly polarised and Koories were engaged in political struggles to strengthen the status and well-being of their people.

Several words in Yolngu-Matha language of North-East Arnhem Land that are considered loanwords from Makassarese, Buginese and other Austronesian languages are compiled. Comparative phonetic elements between the languages are analysed, and the provenance of the loanwords are presented.

Since 1977, the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples. It has promoted publication of Indigenous oral traditions, biographies, languages, archival and bibliographic guides, previously unpublished manuscript accounts, critiques of

The article explores the growing phenomenon of Indigenous Australians' identification with Islam. It focuses on the partnerships between Indigenous and Muslim communities in Australia based on interviews conducted with descendants of Aboriginal-Afghan and Indigenous-Malay unions. It draws attention to a legacy of religious conversion that is not formal but familial.

The article combines the various lines of inquiry by archaeologists, earth scientists, historians and geographers in the past on the Gadubanud society in the Otway with a fresh eye for detail. It provides an analysis of the cultural landscape created by the Gadubanud people prior to their disastrous encounter with Europeans.

In her recent magisterial history of early Sydney, Grace Karskens mused on a critical distinction in emphasis between settler history and Aboriginal history: ‘in settler history we seem to be searching constantly for beginnings’, she notes, ‘but in Aboriginal history in the colonial period so often the search is for endings’. This preoccupation with endings especially haunts