Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018) was an Australian-based ethnographer of Aboriginal peoples; plus, in her lifetime, an increasingly ecological, multi-species ethnographer and leader in multidisciplinary ethnographic research
Early years
Born in 1946, Deborah Bird Rose was the eldest of four siblings (Betsy, Mary, Martha, and Will) growing up in Seattle, Washington, Rock Springs, Wyoming, Salem, Oregon, Salem, Massachusetts, and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France. By the early 1970s Rose was living in Delaware, attending the University of Delaware, where she worked as a research assistant and helped teach within the university's Department of Anthropology, in 1973 completing a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, with honors and distinction.
From 1973 to 1974, Rose was a coordinator of a Women's Education Collective, teaching at a Women's Resource Centre in Newark, Delaware, following which, by 1977, she was in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania completing a Master of Arts in anthropology at Bryn Mawr, a private women's liberal arts College., and for a brief period in 1979 lecturing in Anthropology on cultural and social change at Trenton State College, New Jersey
By 1980 Rose had enrolled in a Doctor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College and obtained a National Science Foundation grant to undertake research in Aboriginal Australia, taking her to Australia and to the Aboriginal Australian community of Yarralin, Northern Territory for which Rose also obtained an Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies grant to study and research the 'cultural identity' of Aboriginal peoples at Yarralin
Ethnographic fieldwork
For a period, from September 1980 to July 1982, Rose immersed herself and conducted twenty-two months ethnographic research within the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingarra, actively observing and interviewing mostly Ngaringman and Ngaliwurru speakers who had otherwise lived the whole of their lives on Anglo-Australian owned cattle stations, wherein Rose participated in, photographed, and learned about these peoples' public ceremonial life, women's secret ceremonial life, and their daily life in town, and in the bush.
From this initial, immersive period of ethnographic research, Rose learns local Aboriginal peoples of the Victoria River District ".. possess their own exegesis of cosmos and humanity.." also known in Aboriginal English as 'the Dreaming', and, in 1983–84, she obtains a grant from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies undertaking to write about and report on "the religious identity of the Aboriginal peoples of the Victoria river", altogether culminating in her producing, for 1984, her Bryn Mawr College Doctor of Philosophy dissertation as follows:
In 1984 Rose presents some of her doctoral findings on Yarralin peoples' religion and religious identity to an Australian Association for the Study of Religions, entitled "Consciousness and Responsibility in an Australian Aboriginal religion", being a summary paper that is later included in W.H Edwards (1987) "Traditional Aboriginal Society: A Reader" for future students of Aboriginal peoples. Rose's ethnography, itself, eventually becomes an influential Australian anthropological book entitled "Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture" published first by Cambridge University Press in 1992, winning the Stanner Prize for a work on Aboriginal issues; next printed in 2000, with a third edition printed in 2011.
Postcolonial histories
At least one reviewer of the ethnographic work arising out of Rose's doctoral fieldwork observed, "..the author’s research is an example of [a] wave of anthropological writing, with [an] emphasis on community involvement, ownership and control.." wherein Rose herself advised:
At the same time as submitting her dissertation, in 1984, Rose submitted to publish the first of her 'Aboriginal histories learnt while undertaking her ethnographic fieldwork; this one entitled 'The Saga of Captain Cook: Morality in Aboriginal and European Law' (1984); followed shortly afterwards with 'Ned Lives!' (1986, later reincarnated as 'Ned Kelly Died for our Sins' 1994); also 'Remembrance' (1986) plus ‘Signs of Life on a Barbarous Frontier: Intercultural Encounters in North Australia’ (1998), all published during a stint as a visiting fellow in Canberra, at the Australian National University's History Department writing the Yarralin Aboriginal teachers' ' "Hidden Histories. Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River, and Wave Hill stations, North Australia" (1991)