Margaret Susan Brock

Margaret Susan "Peggy" Brock (16 March 1948 – 30 May 2023) was an Australian historian and writer. Her major areas of interest were colonial and Indigenous history in Australia, the Pacific and parts of Canada and Africa, with particular interest in Australian Aboriginal women. Her work continues to be cited in national and international debates over Indigenous policy. Born in Adelaide, she took up academic positions and was at the end of her career emeritus professor at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia.

Early life and education Margaret Susan Brock

Brock grew up in Netherby and Hazelwood Park, and went to school at what was then and was educated at Presbyterian Girls' College, now Seymour College.

She travelled widely in her twenties, mainly in Europe.

Publications In 1985, while working for the Aboriginal Heritage Unit in SA, she published her first work, which was based on her work with the Adnyamathanha people of the Northern Flinders Ranges. an edited collection of referenced essays based on original reports to the Aboriginal Heritage Unit by herself and seven other non-Aboriginal women expert in this area (Catherine Berndt, Catherine J. Ellis, Linda Barwick, Helen Payne, Jen Gibson, Jane M. Jacobs, and Luise Hercus), with an additional concluding chapter on the southern region of South Australia written by Fay Gale, a long-established academic researcher of Aboriginal people, to complete an overview of the whole State. The aim of Women Rites & Sites was to demonstrate and correct the cultural bias and gender blindness of previous research on Aboriginal cultural life. It is an early example of new understandings of Australian Indigenous history and culture that began to emerge in the 1980s following Henry Reynolds’ The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981), a controversial history of relations between Aboriginal Australians and European settlers, which has been marked as the beginning of the History Wars.

Soon after, Brock contributed to the Historical Background to the South Australian Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1990), and native title claims in South Australia have often cited her research.

Her third book was Outback Ghettoes. A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival (1993), which also focused on South Australia, while the next, Words and Silences. Aboriginal Women, Politics and Land (2001) continued her focus on Indigenous women but in the wider Australian context.

She spent 15 years researching, transcribing, and writing a major work published in 2011, The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast. She found and assembled the memoirs of a First Nations Canadian (Tsimshian) man, Arthur Wellington Clah, written between the 1850s and 1900s.

Her other books, Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change and Indigenous Evangelist and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750-1940), also go beyond the Australian context.

Recognition and honours Brock was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2005, and has held visiting fellowships at the University of Basel, Switzerland (2003) and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London University (2005).

Personal life Brock married Norman Etherington, whom she met as a lecturer in history at Adelaide University, and they had two sons. Nathan and Ben.

Major works Yura and Udnyu: A History of the Adnyhamathanaha of the North Flinders Ranges Wakefield Press, 1985 and 2022]. Women Rites & Sites. Aboriginal women's cultural knowledge (Allen & Unwin (Australia), 1989) With Kartinyeri, D., Poonindie: The Rise and Destruction of an Aboriginal Agricultural Community (1989) Outback Ghettos. A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival (1993) Words and Silences. Aboriginal Women, politics and land (2001, 2003) Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change (2005) The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast, Vancouver (2011) With Etherington, N., Griffiths, G., & Van Gent, J., Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750-1940 (2015) With Tom Gara (eds.) Colonialism and its Aftermath, A history of Aboriginal South Australia (Wakefield Press, 2017)