Searching in the shadows: Aboriginal women in early colonial New South Wales

Abstract

Colonial archives are notoriously selective in content and heavily mediated at that. These difficulties are compounded when it comes to Indigenous women. Their presence is comparatively slim even compared to Indigenous men, and representations of Indigenous women were frequently speculative, circulating in reiterative colonial networks of image and print and signalling more about colonial preoccupations than Indigenous lives. Despite these difficulties, there is a new and concerted push to recover the voices and experiences of Aboriginal women in Australia’s early colonial history. This chapter charts some of these new directions, tracing the historiography, and considering some of the methodological challenges, requirements, and innovations involved in this movement. It will also explore some of the preliminary findings coming out of this research; discoveries about the refusal to cooperate; about the assertion of difference; about limiting kin involvement with colonists; and about the continuance of lifeways independently of them. These are findings that promise to destabilise current understandings and radically reorient histories of the cross-cultural world early of New South Wales.