AustLit

'Joel Birnie’s achievement in My People’s Songs is to show that Tasmanian Aboriginal people have long had to assert themselves against and with a colonial narrative (mingling sorrow, triumph and self-criticism) that Aboriginal Tasmanians had been wiped out. From the late 1960s, politicians and public servants began to relinquish the idea that only those deemed “full-bloods” are “Aboriginal”, abandoning blood quantum in favour of personal identification. In the 2021 census, 30,186 residents of Tasmania identified themselves as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, a 28 per cent increase from the 2016 census.' (Introduction)