Diane E. Barwick was born in Canada in 1938. She arrived in Australia in 1960, and received her doctoral degree from the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work on the history of Aboriginal communities in Victoria (particularly Coranderrk, Framlingham and Lake Tyers) resulted in a number of publications, including her book Rebellion at Coranderrk, published posthumously in 1998. She contributed many articles, book chapters, pamphlets, manuscripts and photographs to Aboriginal scholarship, and was the co-founder of the journal Aboriginal History, which she also edited from 1978 to 1982. She was also actively involved in a number of Aboriginal issues, and was on the Aboriginal Treaty Committee. Throughout her career, she worked to make history more accessible to Aboriginal people through genealogies and biographies. In 1984 she published a journal article, "Mapping the Past: An Atlas of Victorian Clans, 1835-1904", which was a major reference for the compilation of a large Aboriginal biographical index at the AIATSIS. Her work was stopped short by her death in 1986.
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BARWICK, DIANE ELIZABETH (1938-1986), anthropologist, historian and Aboriginal-rights activist, was born on 29 April 1938 in Vancouver, Canada, daughter of Ronald Bernard McEachern, forest worker, and his wife Beatrice Rosemond, née O’Flynn. She grew up in logging camps, sometimes housed on a log raft. Her father, nicknamed `Bear Tracks’, was a `high rigger’ and camp manager in an industry in which a personal reputation for bravery, skill and sheer survival secured his authority. Apart from one year at a Vancouver high school, Diane was schooled by correspondence before enrolling at the University of British Columbia (BA, 1959), where she graduated with first-class honours in anthropology. Based on five months’ field-work in six camps, her thesis evoked the occupational subculture of the loggers of Englewood Valley.
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