A CERTAIN HERITAGE

In the early eighties I worked with Maria Brandl, an anthropologist, and Warren Snowdon, a teacher and political activist, on a project to prepare for the Minister for Social Security, Senator Margaret Guilfoyle, a volume to help public servants and others involved with Aboriginal people and their children understand something of those among whom they were to work. The volume was called A Certain Heritage and was dedicated

Maria, who alone among us was a professional anthropologist, was our guide in developing an awareness of the existence, the strength and the persistence of that heritage among the various groups of Aborigines. She also made it possible for us to recognise how little public policy and its programs, including those in which we ourselves had been involved, were based on an understanding of the content of that heritage and how, so far from accommodating Aboriginality, they worked to weaken and destroy it.

The book reviewed the Aboriginal heritage – social and cultural – recognising many components which have become, at least to some degree, part of the public image of Aboriginal people.