Changing Aboriginal landscapes of pastoral Victoria, 1830-1850

摘要

Forty years of writing about Aboriginal history has principally focused on human interactions within settler colonialism and examined the discourse and structures of settler dominance. Surprisingly historians — of whom I have been one — have paid relatively little or no attention to the impact of settlement on Aboriginal landscapes as opposed to its impact on Aboriginal lives and cultures. I began to address this briefly in my fourth edition of Aboriginal Australians. A History since 1788 (2010) and this article continues that project.I will argue here for the need of a new perspective on Australian frontier history, one that focuses on changes to Aboriginal land, landscapes and ecologies created by settler colonialism, rather than one simply focusing on settler-Aboriginal relations. In short, the history of colonialism, I argue, must reflect a stronger interest in the human—nature relationship. This article is part of an ongoing study, and only preliminary findings can be presented in one of this length. Bill Gammage in this issue and elsewhere has examined the specific methods of Aboriginal land management by fire over the thousand years before European occupation. Through a case-study of Victoria (south-eastern Australia) during the period of early colonial occupation, 1830 to 1850, my focus will be on Aboriginal understandings of land, including their cultural ideas as far as we can know them, and how pastoral settlement disrupted their world-view and altered its material expression.