The Indigenous history of modern Australia

In this unit, you will consider relations between Indigenous and non-Aboriginal people in Australia since 1770. The main topics will include the legal basis of British sovereignty; the nature of frontier contact; violence and the dispossession of Aboriginal people; Aboriginal depopulation; Aboriginal people's responses to colonialism; government policy and practice, from segregation to assimilation; and Aboriginal political movements. You will simultaneously examine the political and theoretical dimensions associated with representing the Australian Aboriginal past and, in particular, the relationship between power and knowledge in historical discourses.