Source: ANU Reporter - Friday 13 June 1986
WISENET Journal No. 7, September 1986, p. 5
Dr Diane Bell has been appointed to a chair at Deakin University in Geelong.
Dr Diane Bell has recently completed her work as a Research Fellow on the Social Justice Project in the Research School of Social Sciences at the A.N.U.
At the beginning of July she took up her position as Professor of Australian Studies in the School of Humanities at Deakin. She has progressed from matriculation to professor in 15 years.
Dr Bell first went to the ANU on a vacation scholarship in the summer of 1974-75. She camped by the Cotter River with her two children, Genevieve, now 19, and Morgan, now 17, while she studied the Aboriginal behaviour of earlier Cotter camps.
She had been a college-trained primary-school teacher in Victoria, but at 28 decided to matriculate and went on to study anthropology at Monash University. Her student activism at Monash, particularly over the lack of child-care facilities, inspired a senior university administrator to tell her that universities were 'not for people like myself'.
Dr Bell graduated with honours and decided to do postgraduate research at ANU, where she had been impressed earlier by the range of people at an ANZAAS conference and by 'the world of scholarship' in the research schools She feels the schools are 'very privileged', but provide much-needed opportunities for researchers.
Dr Bell studied for her doctorate in the Arts Faculty's Department of Prehistory and Anthropology. Her topic was Aboriginal women's religion, a relatively unexplored field.
She studied a language and went with her children to Warrabri, north of Alice Springs, for 18 months. She participated in the life of the community of 750 people on an ex-government mission and soon found the importance for women of the religious sites and ceremonies. The older women spent most of their time on rituals on the women's ceremonial ground.
'It was a pleasant, gracious existence with those old ladies, sitting all day in the shade while they sang and told stories', Dr Bell told ANUReporter.
Later, Dr Bell returned to help the community with a land claim, returning some of the effort the people had invested in her. The Aboriginal people also saw results in Dr Bell's work on a project on women and customary law, later published as Law: The Old and the Neu (co-author Pam Ditton).
Dr Bell finished her PhD work in 1980 and the reworked thesis was published as Daughters of the Ilreaming in 1983. It is now in its third reprint.
After graduation she worked as an anthropologist for the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Sacred Sites Protection Authority. Threats to women's sites increased awareness of Aboriginal women's issues, she said.
When the Authority seemed to be under threat from the NT Government, Dr Bell decided to go into private practice as an anthropologist.
She returned to ANU in 1983 with a research fellowship in the 'Gender, ideology and politics in the South Pacific' work group in the Department of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific Studies. Then she joined the School's Social Justice Project. There she has been working on a book on social justice and Aborigines since the 1967 referendum that gave the Commonwealth Government concurrent power, with the States, to rnake laws for Aborigines. The book will draw on ethnographic case material to illustrate propositions that would usually be surveyed statistically or in terms of policy considerations. The general portraits will help show Aborigines' position in Aus- tralia and the world.
'I like to work on projects which deal with current problems that we're facing in Australia,' said Dr Bell. 'But unfortunately, there are too few projects like the one on social justice, which allow researchers to confront both theory and practice.'
As well as taking up the Deakin chair, Dr Bell has a grant to write the landmark volume on women in Australia for the Bicentenary. Through interviews she hopes to link generations of Australian women and provide a new look at family history. Ider research assistants were already 'turning up some very interesting material'.
Reflecting on her research in the late 1970s, Dr Bell said that her findings were made possible by social and political factors of the time: there was a resurgence of interest in Aboriginal religion, feminist scholarship was being taken more seriously, Aboriginal people were wanting a greater role in anthropological research and land rights laws were providing anthropologists with a forum. 'But I don't think I could do the research now that I did then,' she said. 'Things have changed too much.'