The politics of suffering : Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus [Book Review]

The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus by Peter Sutton, xii + 268 pp, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria, 2009, ISBN 9780522856361. Peter Sutton’s The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus is a multi-faceted book: memoir, ethnography, policy critique and history. In reviewing it for Aboriginal History, I highlight the historical understanding that it develops and brings to bear on contemporary policy debates. The book could make three contributions to Australian historical research. First, it could introduce into the historians’ vocabulary the term ‘liberal consensus’ to describe what now appears to be an intelligible period of Australian Indigenous policy history: 1968–2000. Second, it highlights the resilience of Indigenous parental authority to colonial encroachment and invites a more complex explanation of Indigenous disadvantage. Third, it intensifies already existing doubts about using the gross categories ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ to denominate the actors in Australian colonial history.