Intermediaries, Servants, or Captives : Disentangling Indigenous labour in D. W. Carnegie’s exploration of the Western Australian desert

In the late fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus kidnapped Caribbean people to train and use them as translators who could inform him about potential dangers and desirable commodities. The Dutch East India Company in the early seventeenth century instructed their captains to capture Indigenous peoples whenever possible for the same purpose. Then, in the late eighteenth century maritime explorers like James Cook and Matthew Flinders, on occasion, kidnapped Islander and Aboriginal people in the Pacific and Australia as punishment for perceived thefts, and as a means of asserting their authority over seemingly recalcitrant native peoples. Thus, for centuries European explorers felt at liberty to capture Indigenous individuals as a strategy for discovering information about local environments and polities, as well as for enforcing discipline and control

Crossing Boundaries: Tracing Indigenous Mobility and Territory in the Exploration of South‑Eastern Australia

In ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Ann Curthoys examined how Indigenous mobility was problematised in settler colonial discourses. She drew on Gamatj leader and former Australian of the Year Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s observation that Aboriginal people were derisively represented as aimless wanderers and nomads, perpetually on ‘walkabout’, while the colonists claimed for themselves the mantle of settlers and natives, ostensibly defending their homelands from marauding Aboriginal people.1 Curthoys highlighted the tension between movement and place, and the ways in which certain kinds of mobility or, to be more specific, the mobility of certain kinds of people—namely, nomadic Indigenous people—have been historically coded as ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘rootless’

The four fathers of Australia : Baz Luhrmann's depiction of Aboriginal history and paternity in the Northern Territory

Baz Luhrmann�s epic film Australia was widely criticised for its depiction of the past when it was released in late 2008. This article suggests that such criticisms myopically centred on historical details, exaggerating the film�s purportedly inauthentic representation of the past. By analysing its portrayal of the four father figures in the film I will examine how Australia engages with the histories of inter-racial sexual relations and the governmental aims of segregation and assimilation during the interwar period

'Wanton With Plenty' Questioning Ethno-historical Constructions of Sexual Savagery in Aboriginal Societies, 1788-1803

Louis Nowra's recently published Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children (2007) includes an ethno-historical study of gender relations in Aboriginal 'traditional' society, drawing on early explorers' observations and anthropological accounts. Inga Clendinnen likewise included a chapter on Aboriginal sexual politics in Dancing with Strangers (2003). This paper critiques their conclusions and methods, and closely analyses the same terrainlate eighteenth-century European representations of Aboriginal sexual relations. My aim is not to deny that there were instances of violence in the sexual conduct of eighteenth-century Aboriginal societies. Instead, this paper demonstrates that Nowra and Clendinnen's ethno-histories fail to present a holistic account of the myriad descriptions of Indigenous gender dynamics that permeate the European explorers' accounts