An Insider’s Account of Aboriginal Melbourne
Julie Andrews, Where’s All the Community? Aboriginal Melbourne Revisited, La Trobe University Press/Black Inc., 2026.
On Anzac Day 2026, opening one of settler Australia’s most consecrated national rites at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, Bunurong Elder Uncle Mark Brown was booed during the Welcome to Country, one of Indigenous Australia’s most significant ceremonies. This was not the first time such heckling had occurred; it was not even the only time that day. The disruptions formed part of a coordinated effort across dawn services in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, an organised attempt to reassert the exclusion of Indigenous presence from Australian public life. That a Welcome to Country can be and is treated as such an affront speaks to the depth of insecurity and hostility that even symbolic forms of Indigenous recognition seemingly provoke in wide swathes of the settler population.
Yorta Yorta scholar Julie Andrews had already registered the pattern in her Where’s All the Community? Aboriginal Melbourne Revisited. Her preface records that the same elder had been booed at the same ceremony at the same site the previous year. This coincided with neo-Nazi violence against Camp Sovereignty in the Kings Domain, both a burial ground and a site of living Aboriginal sovereignty. Such outright hostility is only the most visible problem. Even where Indigenous recognition is embraced rather than shouted down—such as in the Acknowledgements of Country that open institutional events, the renaming of public spaces, or the reframing of monuments—it is too often instrumentalised. Acknowledgment operates at a level of abstraction disconnected from the communities and histories such acts claim to honour. Andrews’ account provides the substance that symbolic forms of recognition so often lack. Hers is an insider history, grounded in kinship, oral history and sixty years of community activism in Aboriginal Melbourne, that contributes to the recovery of the social ground on which those symbols stand.
Drawing on her doctoral research, the archival legacy of anthropologist Diane Barwick’s 1960s Melbourne fieldwork, and her own lived experience growing up in the community, Andrews documents a changing politics and culture. Her history takes us from mission-era dispossession through waves of twentieth-century migration and organisation-building, to contemporary challenges including the community’s outward diffusion from its inner-city heartland, the mediation of kinship through social media, and the fraught politics of Welcome to Country. The arc of activism that Andrews documents culminates in the Yoorrook Justice Commission and the passage of Victoria’s Treaty legislation in October 2025.
The central argument of Andrews’ carefully assembled, anthropologically inflected history is that Aboriginal Melbourne is constituted not by fixed geography but by relational networks of kinship, care and collective advocacy. This is what she calls ‘Aboriginal ways of knowing’, grounded in socialisation, oral history and the embodied recognition of family through names, faces and shared connections to Country.
The book negotiates a complex task in addressing two audiences at once: non-Aboriginal Australians seeking to understand urban Aboriginal experience in the context of Treaty, and a younger generation of Aboriginal Melburnians who, as Andrews puts it, ‘are searching’ for their community’s history, and ‘are hungry for it’. The book constitutes, in this sense, an act of intergenerational transmission—recording the community’s history at a moment Andrews presents as a ‘changing of the guard’ as key figures, including Archie Roach, Margaret Gardiner and Jack Charles pass and a new generation of advocates emerges.
And yet in addressing these two audiences, the book necessarily negotiates tensions, even contradictions that it does not always name. The most significant point is this: Andrews persuasively argues that Aboriginal identity is constituted through kinship, co-present socialisation and oral history, while simultaneously documenting the dispersion of the concentrated, inner-city community—the Fitzroy of the 1960s and 1970s—through which those forms were historically transmitted. The title question—‘where’s all the community?’—surfaces throughout as a communal elegy, a lament Andrews acknowledges but sees as premature and seeks to correct. The community has not been lost, she argues, but transformed—its identity carried forward through institutional legacy, individual advancement and new forms of connection. It is a welcome corrective, and yet it rests here more on assertion than sustained analysis of the underlying dynamics of how an identity constituted through co-presence survives the dissolution of the social forms that sustained it, remaining unexplored.
This is not a failure so much as an opening. Andrews’ own material—the shift from the bush telegraph to Facebook, the juxtaposition of a new Aboriginal middle class with the Parkies who remain on the streets of Fitzroy, the transition from community-controlled organisations as ‘the core of our identity’ to a more individualised pursuit of ‘advancement’—points towards questions about what happens to community, and to the identity constituted through it, when its social relations are increasingly lifted out from face-to-face encounter grounded in co-presence to more mediated forms of connection. While the book does not itself draw out the full implications of these tensions—tensions that will be familiar to readers of Arena—it does assemble, with great care, the evidence that provides the necessary foundations from which that work might proceed.
Where’s All the Community? demonstrates that the symbolic forms of recognition are now under coordinated attack—not least Uncle Mark Brown’s Anzac Day Welcome to Country at the Shrine. It shows that they are not abstract gestures but expressions of a history that Andrews documents with care, particularity and familial authority. That community—and its forms of expression—are not without tension or contradiction. The book’s own evidence makes that clear. At a moment when Indigenous recognition is being simultaneously hollowed out and shouted down, the depth of the history Andrews recovers is indispensable. For the settler public, it is a corrective to the abstraction that empties acts of recognition of any substantive meaning. For a younger generation of Aboriginal Melburnians, it is an act of intergenerational transmission in the present moment, which Andrews characterises as a ‘changing of the guard’. That this is the book’s purpose is clear from its conclusion: ‘the Aboriginal community of Melbourne’ that Andrews and her generation grew up in ‘is no more’. But what that community instilled endures, and working towards making that insistence a reality is critical.