Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australian History

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Taught at a host institution. Australia's history has been characterised by movement and mobility—its historical origins are often said to date from the arrival of the European explorers, followed by convicts transported to Australian shores, and subsequent waves of migrants from Europe, Asia, the Pacific and elsewhere fleeing war torn homelands, poverty, or seeking to make new lives. Indigenous history is also marked by mobility, from the originary journeys made by ancestral beings, to the experience of forced removal and displacement from country in the wake of colonisation. Today, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are highly mobile, criss-crossing the land for work, pleasure and obligation. Yet, while such histories have been written about as experiences of emigration, expulsion and exile, by looking at individual lives we can see that such movements also produced and enabled new intimacies and relationships. Recent histories suggest that without built environments convicts and officers rubbed shoulders, explorers and Aboriginal people curiously studied one another, and the frontier was marked by cross-cultural sexual and marital relations, coerced and consensual. This unit investigates the desires, ambitions, ideas and policies which motivated some to travel, and resulted in the forced removal from their homelands for others. How has social mobility been enabled by such movements? What do individual and family stories of journey and the formation of new intimate relationships reveal about Australia's shared history? What approaches can facilitate such intimate histories?