Australian Indigenous Studies

This paper argues that white settler researchers seeking to engage with Indigenous sovereignty or contribute to antiracist and decolonising struggles should approach these critical encounters with and through awareness of our complicity in ongoing racism and colonialism, which involves appreciating our locations and limits. A discourse of colonizing white innocence circulates in policy, academic and other spaces to reinforce and obscure progressive white investments in maintaining power relationships generated by ongoing colonising racist violence through presenting particular individuals, groups and institutions as non-problematic, and so not complicit in historical and contemporary violence. This foundational assumption allows white settlers to assume that our contributions are benevolent or in the interests of Indigenous people and that we ourselves transcend our own locations within racist and colonising systems of rule, in so doing emphasising our legitimacy and authority in relation to Indigenous people. Complicity establishes both a political responsibility and an intellectual imperative to understand and contest systems of domination in which we are enmeshed through deliberate respectful engagements with those who have experiences, knowledges and forms of authority that we do not and cannot possess.

In this paper we use key learnings from the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC REP), Remote Education Systems and Pathways to Employment research projects to critique the white paper on Developing the North and the potential of such a future to unleash the norths potential. With very little about how to maximise the values of Aboriginal peoples or even a recognition of the availability of an Aboriginal workforce, we ask how this traditionally orientated development proposal will build strengths and capacities within the North, not simply contribute to Gross National Product (GNP). From a strong research base we highlight flawed assumptions behind current Aboriginal employment strategies and what does and does not work in terms of local Aboriginal workforce development. Through this we point to an extensive gap in innovation with industry and entrepreneurial activity limited to five growth sectors. Finally, drawing on the results and implications of our respective research projects, we propose some ways in which industries, regulators, legislators and government sponsored innovation initiatives could respond to better harness the latent potential of Aboriginal peoples and communities.

"There are well-established ethical standards that apply to the conduct of research in Australia, including research within Indigenous contexts. Ethics committees oversee academic or institutional research design and practice to ensure that methods are culturally appropriate and that the rights of individuals and communities are respected and protected. NHMRC guidelines specifically address the issues of Aboriginal and Torres Strait  Islander participants. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has produced a set of research  Ethics guidelines, structured around 14 principles.
Evaluation is a form of research which provides particular ethical issues. As well as being guided by the ethical guidelines set out above, the Australasian Evaluation Society’s guidelines for ethical conduct of evaluations also provide a standard that Australian evaluators in general would adhere to.
But do these ethics processes and guidelines take into account the complete array of issues that arise with program evaluations? The authors’ experiences and observations suggest that they do not, and they are supported by much of the international literature. After detailing some of the challenges faced by the authors and by others working in the northern Australian context, four potential areas of improvement are detailed. The seminar will be of particular interest to research and evaluation practitioners, commissioners of evaluation and organisations/agencies that are subject to evaluation. "

Peter J. Anderson and Bernadette Atkinson teach Indigenous and Traditionally Education in a Global World as a fourth year unit in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Clayton. This paper is a selfreflective piece of work where we discuss the use of graduate attributes relating to Indigenous Education, put forward by the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). These standards have the potential to improve pre-service teachers knowledge in relation to Indigenous education, therefore equipping them with the necessary skills and tools required to teach effectively to Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. The focus of this paper pertains specifically to AITSL focus area 2.4 Understand and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to promote reconciliation between Indigenous and non- Indigenous Australians discussing how pre-service teachers can promote reconciliation and teach Indigenous subject matter in a respectful manner to non-Indigenou...

If poets are compelled toward cultivating voice then, logically enough, to which ends? In his recent monograph, "Polysituatedness: a poetics of displacement" (2017), one of Australia’s foremost politically engaged poets John Kinsella asserts that poetry “is so often less about ‘art’ and more about ‘activism’,” and that within this reckoning, he remains “interested in the poem’s potential for resistance, not its compliance with a status quo” (40) ...

In 2006, the Australian Government amended the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cth) to enable the grant of township leases over Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory. It was a reform which attracted considerable debate. This article collates information about the two existing township leases, and examines this against the stated aims of township leasing. It is argued that a high level of confusion has characterised the implementation of these reforms, and that one of the risks of township leases is that they give the impression of doing more than they actually do. The article concludes by arguing that the Australian Government needs to pay greater attention to clarifying the rationale for its Aboriginal land reform policies.

While this landmark anthology refuses the "voyeuristic obsession with tragedy and trauma as the ultimate and only contribution of Aboriginal writing to Australian literary studies" (xix), at their most angered, the poems in Guwayu "sing for the massacres that litter our lands" (Ali Cobby Eckermann, page 39), and recall "Connected sites of significance [that] have disappeared" (Lorna Munro, page 6).

Corresponding with the aesthetic of bir'yun or 'shimmering brilliance' created by the cross-hatching in Yolŋu painting, manikay (song) might also be characterised by a play of colour and movement, generated through the heterophonic interweaving of voices. While bir'yun might be considered a technique that generates emotion or a sense of beauty, the perception of bir'yun is decidedly more than the aesthetic. Bir'yun encompasses constitutional, political and educational dimensions, affirming Wägilak identity and purpose through an interplay of difference, in the diverse voices that enfolded together on the ceremonial ground (bambula). As the experience of bir'yun is enriched by new voices and colours, a productive approach to collaboration between Yolŋu and Balanda (non-indigenous) Australians is suggested: through mutually enriching conversation, a living interplay of voices is generated that brings life to the whole.

This paper extends out of 10 years of music teaching with Daniel Wilfred and our exploration of 'openings' within manikay for collaborative performance.

Presented at the 19th Symposium on Indigenous Music and Dance, National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia

Ngukurr in Southern Arnhem Land is a Kriol-speaking community of around 1,000 people with one
government school catering for students from preschool to secondary years. Outside of a handful of
bilingual schools, remote schools in the Northern Territory like Ngukurr teach largely in English-only
and it is atypical for home language to be incorporated into local curricula in a structured way. A
community-based program in Ngukurr called Meigim Kriol Strongbala (Make Kriol Strong) has been
supporting Ngukurr School since 2019 to incorporate Kriol into students’ formal education. In Term 1
of 2020, Meigim Kriol Strongbala and Ngukurr School collaborated to develop and deliver a Health
and Physical Education unit to one Early Years class at Ngukurr School of mostly Year 2 and 3
students.

The classroom teacher (Carter) had identified that Kriol delivery would allow students to interact and
understand with the content better. Carter also noted that students were more likely to use Kriol
when angry or upset further supporting the utility of delivering Australian Curriculum content such
as “Being healthy safe and active” and “Communicating & interacting for health and wellbeing”
(ACARA 2020) in Kriol.

The Kriol unit that was developed and delivered was based on the Zones of Regulation curriculum
(Kuypers 2011) which promotes self-regulation and emotional control. Keywords used in Zones of
Regulation curricula (e.g. ‘just right’, ‘silly’, ‘bad’) were reconceptualised to create a unit that was
embedded in the students’ own worldviews. For example, the English-derived word sheim was
introduced as a focus word but unlike English ‘shame’ this word is used by Aboriginal students
according to its distinctive semantics (as described by Harkins 1990). Non-English derived keywords
were featured as keywords in the unit, including jinggarlibala ‘proud’ (used as a contrast to sheim
‘shame’) and wanguluwan (covering meanings like ‘orphan’, ‘alone’ and ‘uncared for’). Delivering the
unit in Kriol also implicitly fostered awareness and pride in students’ first language.

The delivery of the unit was evaluated as highly successful with the series of lessons assessed as
enjoyable and engaging. Students quickly demonstrated emerging practices of using Kriol/L1 as a
language of content learning (which was novel for them) and a number of reticent learners in the
classroom came out of their shell not only during the Kriol lesson delivery but with demonstrated
increased engagement across all parts of the curriculum. Throughout 2020, students have continued
using Kriol terminology as they continue to develop self-regulated behaviour skills using the Zones
of Regulation curriculum.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples make up 3.3% of
the nation’s population. Geographically, 62% of the Indigenous
population live outside of Australia’s major cities, including 12%
in areas classified as very remote. The median age for Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander peoples is 23 compared to 38 for
the non-indigenous population. Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples are vastly overrepresented in the Australian
criminal justice system, with 2,481 prisoners per 100,000 Indigenous
people—15 times greater than for the non-indigenous
population.

Official government targets set for 2018 in 2008 to halve
the gap between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians
as regards child mortality, employment, and reading and numeracy,
as well as closing the gap in school attendance, were
not met this year. The target to close the gap in life expectancy
by 2031 is not on track. The government has established 16
new targets under a new agreement to close the gap.
There are approximately 3,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander corporations registered under the federal Corporations
(Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act 2006 (CATSI Act), including
186 registered native title land-holding bodies.
There is currently no reference to Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples in the national Constitution although
the movement towards constitutional recognition has intensified.

This research aims to elaborate the journey of Australian Indigenous in Tara June Winch's novel entitled Swallow the Air. This novel is about journey of half-Aboriginal girl through Australia in search of self-realisation and sense of belonging. She encounters the condition of modern Australia which is different from her expectation about traditional land. The encounters result negotiations between herself and Other. Using Carl Thompson's concept of travel writing, this research analyze the pattern of reportation of the world, revelation of self, and represetation of other, also elaborate agenda of Swallow the Air as a travelogue. The analysis uses are close reading and comparative as a research method. This research shows that modern Indigenous' identity and cultural crisis affected the pattern of travelogue. The pattern of reportation of the world and representation of other indicate subject position, between Europe and Aborigin. She portrays both sides as other, also deliver her comment on each group. As a postcolonial travel writing, this novel depicts power relation in contemporary Australia, to deliver ethical challenge to the government about Indigenous reconciliation. Carrying the spirit of cosmopolitan vision, this novel offers negotiation between traditional and modern values. It also conveys the strategy of liberation by directing toward wider identity, national or even global identity. As Indigenous travel writing, mobility in this novel accommodates the creation of wider and further attempt of resistence, by using network among communities or 'homes' as inter-sites of resistance placed under the umbrella of Australian nation. Nevertheless, that resistance attempt is nof fully flawless since it also contains risk of falling to the force of globalisation.

The article reopens the issue of the supposed absence of historical consciousness among traditionally oriented Aborigines, and reviews Hill's and Turner's attempts to define the difference between myth and history. It then discusses some narratives of colonisation from Western New South Wales, and re-analyses some Aboriginal stories about Captain Cook.

This essay investigates chronologically, the agency of two significant inter-related forces which shaped and impacted the self-determination of Indigenous art and culture from the postcolonial period in Australia. Firstly, is the work of German cultural historian Ulli Beier who in the recommendations he provided in his Report on the mission art business for Dr. H.E. Coombs in 1969 outlined progressive ideas for the setting of future indigenous cultural policy frameworks for the Australian Government. These initiatives were based on his years of experience in Africa and New Guinea promoting the self-determination of indigenous voice within their nation’s culture. They would inform the making of indigenous arts policy across all indigenous sectors within Australia, including the Aboriginal Arts Board AAB of the Australia Council, the second influential force to be investigated within this history. The AAB was established as an independent, government-funded, all-indigenous governed organisation, whose innovative operations would establish the art centres in remote Australia, many cultural bodies and promote the fine arts profile of Indigenous art within Australia, and importantly, internationally. The cumulative impact of the forces set in motion by the AAB initiatives were instrumental in ensuring the promotion of indigenous cultural agendas that would lay important foundations which would lead to significant changes to discourses of the nation’s high art and the acceptance of indigenous art as contemporary within global art discourses.

The Rainbow Serpent and the Young Man Wunggurr nyindi Warrunga jirri was illustrated
and told by Eamarlden Rivers in 2016 in Mowanjum, an Aboriginal Community in the
Kimberley, Western Australia. In May 2018 Matthew Dembalali Martin and Pansy Ngalgarr Nulgit retold Eamarlden’s story in Ungarinyin with the assistance of Rona Goonginda Charles, at Mangkajarda wetlands near Mowanjum. The retelling of Eamarlden’s story was translated by Matthew Dembalali Martin, Pansy Nalgarr Nulgit, and Thomas Saunders. The translation was edited by Sally Treloyn to fit the format of Eamarlden’s book.

This is a new story in English by a young Nyikina and
Ngarinyin dancer and storyteller, retold in Ngarinyin
language by elders in the Kimberley region of
Western Australia.

A young man, chased by his brothers, is protected
by the Rainbow Serpent until they join together to
dance Junba. The Rainbow Serpent and the Young
Man, Wunggurr nyindi Warrunga jirri is a cultural story
about bullying and the healing power of Country and dancing.

In 1932, the respected anthropologist Raymond Firth wrote that the Aboriginal Australian manifested a strange trait, one unlike their indigenous counterparts elsewhere in the colonised Pacific. The Indigenous person, Firth said, ‘mutely dies.’ It would take just two hundred years of settler-Indigenous contact—and, within that span, a few intense decades of frontier activity—to decimate the Indigenous people who had been in Australia for forty thousand years. If this population died at all ‘mutely’, then it may well have been in shock and trauma. Silence, after all, is a common response to extreme suffering. To invoke Cathy Caruth, this implores us to engage in ‘a new mode of reading and listening [or viewing] that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demands’. These relations between contemporary and historical silence—as well as suffering and violence—powerfully arise in Australian director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009), the focus of this chapter. Forgetting or denying Australia’s foundational structure of colonisation generates silence around what happened in the nation’s past. Samson and Delilah thus depicts trauma as a crisis of speech, a trope we can read as a reflection on representing Indigenous suffering in contemporary Australia. In analysing how the film depicts trauma in form and content, the chapter discusses silence, historical inheritances and belonging as central concerns of the film. These concerns draw all Australian subjects into positions of implication, although with incommensurate, unevenly distributed suffering between Indigenous and settler groups. Samson and Delilah is unflinching in its criticism of all implicated parties—the web of social, cultural and political forces acting on the couple at its centre. This adds up to an uncommonly holistic appraisal of the trails of trauma in a setting where colonisation is entrenched and continuing.

A Record in Stone is a descriptive presentation of stone-tool types from the continent of Australia, which combines Australian prehistory with lithic typology from a tutorial perspective. A unique and welcome feature is a supplemental compact disc (CD-ROM) which stores color images of the black and white illustrations in the text. The CD contains nearly 500 images of various stone tools, data tables, and images of flintknapping. The images are high-quality and include both JPEG and HTML formats; in many of the photographs, diagnostic morphological features are labeled. Such a visual format in books about prehistory is rare; it provides the reader with a quick-reference source for color images that often are too expensive to print in the text. A CD is a suitable alternative and should be considered by other authors in paleoanthropology and related disciplines.

This work engages in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the legitimatory discourse of the governing Australian Labor Party in relation to the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory policy 2012. The policy effectively prolonged central provisions of the Northern Territory Emergency Response 2007 and can be perceived as neocolonial intervention directed at the incorporation of Black Australians into the Australian nation-state. The analysis focuses on speeches by members of the Labor party, delivered in the context of the parliamentary debates on the SFP. Four recurring discourses have been identified and investigated according to their ideological content and their legitimising function. While a discourse of listening can be perceived as genuine commitment to take the views of Black Australians seriously, discourses of learning/progress and caring/vulnerability are rather ambivalent. The discourse of agency, which is identified based on an analysis of transitivity – the power position which is ascribed to individuals or groups based on the semantic and grammatical structure of a text –, overshadows the other discourses and strips Black Australians of their ability to change and deal with their social problems themselves. Positive transformation is rendered possible exclusively through contact with white Australians’ social and cultural forms, which can be seen as the central legitimising argument by the speakers. This perception that outside intervention is the only solution, however, must be considered as serious hindrance to the policy aim of empowering Black Australians in general, and vulnerable Black Australians in particular.

This paper will look at moral panics over the presence of Chinese diggers on the Victorian goldfields and examine the commonalities between anti-Chinese sentiment and popular attitudes towards the local indigenous population. It will consider both in terms of the politics of land usage in the colonial context and the function of associated assumptions about the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon culture and institutions.

To that end this paper will examine the development of fears of the Yellow Peril, especially in the aftermath of the Eureka Rebellion of 1854. It will consider the extent to which the repressive behaviour of the colonial administration further negative outcomes in the spread of popular racism. It will look at at how racism functioned then as an outlet or ‘safety valve’ for tensions produced by the colonial style of administration that were otherwise not permitted expression.

Ultimately then this paper will explore racism as a means of facilitating blame-shifting and avoiding accountability for institutional injustices stemming from colonialism more broadly. It will consider the meaning of ‘whiteness’ and the tendency to perceive the world through the prisms of class and the dominant ethnicity in these terms, and examine the extent to which such were the motivating force behind the development of the White Australia policy.

The construction of the Cambridge Downs homestead, built between 1876 and 1877 on the Stawell River in central north Queensland, has long been thought unusual for the region. Local folklore suggests that it was intentionally fortified as protection against Aboriginal attack and a 2009 replica of the homestead in the main street of Richmond presents this story as a central part of the region’s history. A survey of the structure, however, reveals a building that is atypical but not necessarily fortified. Archaeological and architectural studies of supposedly fortified structures elsewhere are similarly equivocal. We argue that such accounts are part of a long tradition of representing Aboriginal people as a threat. The attacks that such architecture is intended to deter are on domestic spaces, and often on the sacrosanct spaces of family, women and children. As such, they enhance visions of ‘ordinary’ people as battlers and are automatically cast in terms of choices that are defensive...

Santal farmers of Sahebganj Bagadgada-farm under Gobindganj Upazila in Gaibandha district issued a memorandum to Deputy Commissioner of Gaibandha district in Bangladesh on 21 April 2022 to cancel the Export Processing Zone (EPZ) establishment plan on 1842.30 acres of Santal land after the protest procession. Hundreds of Santals and local Bengali farmers participates the procession holding with their traditional weapons arrow and bow. The protest rally and Memorandum submission program was organized by Sahebganj Bangda Farm Bhumi Uddhar Sangram Committee (SBBUSC) and Jatiya Adivasi Parishad (JAP) Central Committee. They claim, Bangladesh Export Processing Zone Authority (BEPZA) has announced the establishment plan of EPZ without maintaining the proper and meaningful consultation with the indigenous Santal and Bengali farmers.

One aspect of the contemporary interest in ‘local’ foods has been the appearance of products based on Australian native plants. In this article, I explore the place identities presented in the packaging of these products. How are the intimate connections between land and ingredients implicit in the idea of native foods represented in contemporary commodity culture? And how are these relationships between food and place situated within larger discourses of national identity and territory? While native foods present a unique and potent way of engaging with local foods, I argue that the consumer culture of native foods reinforces a naturalised conception of place that un-reflexively conflates the local with the national. Place is conceived of in largely natural terms, ignoring historical and social factors, including, crucially, the Indigenous Australian traditional knowledge on which native food production rests.

The politics of representing Aboriginality often focuses on questions of authorship and appropriation. Much of this criticism rests on the simplistic assumption that texts created by collaboration and even uneven collaboration are not in some respects voiced by their subject or subjects. This paper discusses two popular texts about Aboriginal ceremonial songs or ‘songlines’ in order to challenge this assumption, reading Bill Harney with A. P. Elkin’s Songs of the Songmen: Aboriginal Myths Retold (1949), and John Bradley with Yanyuwa Families’ Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (2010) as Aboriginal texts. These texts are particularly interesting insofar as they focus attention on the relationship between voice and text, as well as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, being the products of collaboration by the anthropologists Elkin and Bradley with, on the one hand, a non-Aboriginal ‘Protector’ and popular writer (Harney), and, on the other, the subjects of the ethnography themselves (that is Yanyuwa Families). As I argue, the shifting ways in which the songlines of northern Australia are voiced in Songs of the Songmen and Singing Saltwater Country provides insights into the politics of representing Aboriginality in Australia, and the forces that have historically affected it. The close analysis of these texts focuses attention on the role of ethnographic fetishism for the exotic and authentic within the changing context of cultural production in Australia.

The old adage, ‘silence speaks louder than words’ does not mean that silence is simply a passive absence. As renowned playwright Harold Pinter demonstrated, silence has a power to communicate and dominate. This article explores the endurance of the Great Australian Silence over the history of our colonial past, and the continuing colonization of Indigenous people. Despite the introduction of Indigenous Studies and Indigenous History into school and university programs, and despite the heart-felt statements that Australians need to understand their own history, that understanding remains partial. The desire to engage with this history appears problematic. This article argues that the failure of a more embracing history to penetrate, more than partially, into the education system and popular understanding is a product of a particular national imagination embodied in projections of the Australian landscape and the Australian individual. The case is put that a particular way of framing the embodiment of national identity and the land has created an imagining of ‘Australianness’ that impacts on our capacity to hear and accept the history of Indigenous colonization. It argues this embodiment, when accepted uncritically, perpetuates not simply a silence but an un-history, a not-telling, a non-acceptance of colonial history post-1788.

Indigenous Peoples of Bangladesh produce and drink different types of alcoholic beverages, like- Haria/Handi in the Northwest, Dochoani in the CHT and Chu or chu-bit-chi in the Northeast regions. However, this paper discusses the beverages of the Northwest region. Haria (Handi in Santhali) is a home-made alcoholic beverage popular among the Adivasis in the North Bengal. The Santals call it handi.

Four stars in the night sky have been formally recognised by their Australian Aboriginal names. The names include three from the Wardaman people of the Northern Territory and one from the Boorong people of western Victoria. The Wardaman star names are Larawag, Wurren and Ginan in the Western constellations Scorpius, Phoenix and Crux (the Southern Cross). The Boorong star name is Unurgunite in Canis Majoris (the Great Dog). They are among 86 new star names drawn from Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian, South African, and Aboriginal Australian cultures.

Songlines map the creation of the Australian continent as form emerged from formlessness through song. Peoples of the Western Desert have performed these songs since their feet first followed the tracks of their Tjukurpa creation ancestors across the country. Keepers of the songs today recognise that their grandchildren live in a digital world in which multimedia technology can be used as an interactive memory bank for passing on their performance tradition. In 2013 Elders of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples performed of the ancient Kungkarangkalpa Inma in Canberra at the National Museum of Australia.

In recent decades, archaeologists have responded to internal dialogues and external critiques by facilitating greater involvement of descendant peoples and other source communities in many aspects of archaeology. Although significant changes have occurred, substantial ethical challenges remain. While most archaeologists are nominally in favor of a more equitable archaeology, in reality they still hold the power in terms of the actual production and interpretation of archaeological knowledge, access to or use of data, and the capital derived from these processes. The very idea of sharing power appears threatening to some because it means a radical revisioning of ethical responsibilities and research paradigms and altering deep-seated notions about scholarly privilege, intellectual property, and control over the production of knowledge... On the other hand, members of descendant communities,  who understandably experience their own anxieties over losses of cultural knowledge, have challenged the relevance of archaeology to their needs and beliefs, sometimes seeking to amend historical power imbalances through exclusionary practices, restrictions on access to sites or the information derived from them. At the same time, archaeology often occupies an ambivalent or subordinate position in relation to political and economic interests (Hamilakis 1999; Schmidt 2005). ...

The book and accompanying DVD shows how coolamons are carved and the types of trees and tools used to make them. Coolamons are an important part of Gurindji culture. They are used to carry young babies, collect bush foods and medicines and they have an important place in many ceremonies.

Gurindji is a Ngumpin-Yapa language of northern Australia. Ngumpin-Yapa languages have contributed a number of debates in formal theory around non-config- urationality and phrase structure. Gurindji is also one of the contributing languages to Gurindji Kriol which is one of the main mixed languages discussed in the literature on contact languages, largely because it has challenged theoretical assumptions about mixed languages.

In this article, I critique the historical narratives surrounding the consumption of Australian native foods by European settlers. I argue that culinary historians and other commentators present the contemporary consumption of native foods as a means of rejecting the colonial attitudes of the past. In this narrative, early settlers lacked appreciation for Australian native foods and, by extension, Indigenous Australian culture and knowledge. Based on this depiction of colonial history, the current interest in native foods becomes symbolic of a wider revaluing of Australia’s previously denigrated indigenous flora and fauna and Indigenous people. However, as I relate, some early European settlers and their descendants ate a wide variety of native Australian foods. These historical episodes challenge the conventional narrative of Australian culinary history and, in particular, the idea that contemporary consumption constitutes a novel break from past culinary practices. Moreover, as I demonstrate, settler interest in native foods was often consistent with the attitudes that justified and underwrote colonisation. By drawing attention to the role that native foods played in the colonial project, I complicate the idea that recognition of these foods is sufficient to address this history.