South Australian Museum Staff
Peter Sutton
- Honorary Research Associate
- Australian Aboriginal Ethnology
Biography
Associate-Professor Peter Sutton is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide (Earth & Environmental Sciences) and the South Australian Museum. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
He is located at the Museum where he is writing books on the social and cultural history of the Wik people of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, including material culture. One of the most comprehensive Wik material culture collections, that of Ursula McConnel (1888-1957), and many of her papers, are held by the Museum. Peter has worked with Wik people since 1976.
Peter is an anthropologist and linguist. He has lived and worked with Aboriginal people in remote areas of Cape York Peninsula and the Northern Territory, but also in urban and rural centres, since 1969. He assisted with over fifty indigenous land claim cases in many different parts of Australia 1979-2005.
Peter is also an author or editor of thirteen books and has published over a hundred academic and other papers, mainly in the fields of Aboriginal land tenure, languages, art, and indigenous policy.
Major Publications: (Top 5)
Sutton, P. (ed.) 1988. Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. New York: The Asia Society Galleries & George Braziller; Melbourne: Viking/Penguin.
Sutton, P. 1995. Country: Aboriginal Boundaries and Land Ownership in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal History Monographs (ANU).
Sutton, Peter 2003. Native Title in Australia: an Ethnographic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sutton, Peter 2006. Sacred images and political engagements. A brief history of Wik sculpture. In Zara Stanhope (ed.), Imagine... the Creativity Shaping our Culture. Bulleen, Victoria: Heide Museum of Modern Art [unpaginated].
Sutton, Peter 2009. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
08 8207 7500
08 8203 9805
