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Cross-cultural encounters produce boundaries and frontiers. This book explores the formation, structure, and maintenance of boundaries and frontiers in settler colonies. The southern nations of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have a common military heritage as all three united to fight for the British Empire during the Boer and First World Wars. The book focuses on the southern latitudes and especially Australia and Australian historiography. Looking at cross-cultural interactions in the settler colonies, the book illuminates the formation of new boundaries and the interaction between settler societies and indigenous groups. It contends that the frontier zone is a hybrid space, a place where both indigene and invader come together on land that each one believes to be their own. The best way to approach the northern Cape frontier zone is via an understanding of the significance of the frontier in South African history. The book explores some ways in which discourses of a natural, prehistoric Aboriginality inform colonial representations of the Australian landscape and its inhabitants, both indigenous and immigrant. The missions of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Polynesia and Australia are examined to explore the ways in which frontiers between British and antipodean cultures were negotiated in colonial textuality. The role of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand society is possibly the most important and controversial issue facing modern New Zealanders. The book also presents valuable insights into sexual politics, Aboriginal sovereignty, economics of Torres Strait maritime, and nomadism.
different stages of the colonisation of South Australia – the frontier together with the time and space beyond the frontier – and two quite different understandings of Aboriginal sovereignty. While the frontier itself undoubtedly witnessed a complex array of relationships between and within colonisers and colonised, the following analysis proposes the distinctiveness of the time and
today's debates over the relationship between Constitutional recognition, treaty, and sovereignty, we find here that Aboriginal sovereignty was not just recognised but operationalised in government policy. Domesticated and submerged, Aboriginal sovereignty was to be contained in reserves and within a narrative of supersession, as a starting point away from which ‘natives’ would march on their way to the promised land of citizenship. But, for Aboriginal people, their sovereignties need not be consigned to the reserve or to the past. They could be coeval. As Audra
The Court’s approach to reconciliation forcibly includes non-treaty aboriginal peoples within Canadian society and subjects them to an alien sovereignty, even though most never consented to such an arrangement. This inclusion subordinates aboriginal sovereignty, and limits the uses to which their land can be put. The implications of this approach deeply undermine original
Aboriginal sovereignty and rights in land. Authorities were troubled by the spread of costly settlements beyond their control, and the treaty was quickly voided on the grounds that the Crown alone had an exclusive right of pre-emption. Described as ‘pretence’, the treaty was declared null and void on 26 August 1835 in a formal proclamation issued by Bourke. The proclamation stated
Eastern Arnhem Land was taken up in the 1930s and quickly abandoned after a series of strategic attacks on cattle. 56 The 1928 Coniston massacre – where a punitive mission led by police murdered at least 31, and perhaps as many as 110, Warlpiri people – came after Aboriginal threats to white settlers in the area which were, it seems clear, designed to assert Aboriginal sovereignty in the area. Its immediate provocation was the murder of Fred Brooks, a dingo hunter, but there had been a history of Aboriginal declarations of authority to which the massacre was a more
polity smoothly constituted by ordered and adjacent jurisdictions, framing pluralism or multiplicity within a unitary polity. Strehlow recognised the Aboriginal sovereignty before him. And indirect rule represented an attempt to submerge it. This was a logic of recognition that worked to limit the possibilities of Indigenous sovereignties by reducing them to a supplement to a settler sovereignty that had (and has) been decentred by the acknowledgement of precolonial – and continuing – Indigenous communities. Suppression, reaffirming the force of settler law, was a
between Aboriginal people and Queen Victoria than was ever apparent in Australia, where there was no history of alliance between the Crown and Aboriginal groups, and no formal acknowledgement of pre-existing Aboriginal sovereignty through treaty negotiations. Nonetheless, despite the absence of a parallel diplomatic history, Aboriginal peoples across Australia’s colonies
contradictory practice of Aboriginal sovereignty, animating increasingly intensified efforts to pursue resolution, to fabricate an end to the story. 35 But defeat was embedded in this march. Veracini has noted that settler colonial narratives promise an end to the story, the supersession of Aboriginal society that would never come, what Strakosch and Macoun term a ‘vanishing endpoint’. 36 The eternal deferral of the end of the story ought not to distract from the productive utility of its promise and anticipation. Northern reserves In
seek land and citizenship rights. But they also focused on Aboriginal self-government, suggesting that claims made under the sign of citizenship were rooted in the continuing practice of Aboriginal sovereignties. Indigeneity was represented, in other words, as the source of Aboriginal people's entitlement to rights. These were not simply, as Tony Austin has suggested, assimilationist organisations: the ‘ultimate object’ of the League was ‘the conservation of special features of the Aboriginals culture and the removal of all hardships Political, social or economic