Indigenous Heterogeneity

Abstract

In the last twenty years, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have more openly articulated different ways of understanding their pasts and futures and the opportunities and obstacles that Australia presents to them. Such Indigenous diversity should provoke the curiosity of those writing the history of Australia's internal colonial experience. I begin this paper by criticising an approach to Australian history that emplots the colonial story as a teleology of ‘elimination’ and inhibits historical characterisation of the many forms of Australian indigeneity to which colonial history has given rise. I then sketch two schemata for historians to consider. One is a North/South binary that emphasises regional distinctions in the colonial formation of Indigeneities. The other disassembles the Dying Native story—central to the settler colonial imagination—into three scenarios, each provoking its own set of non-Indigenous and Indigenous responses.

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