Precarious Subjects: Picturing Indigenous British Subjecthood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Australia
Date
2023
Authors
Nettelbeck, A.
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Australian Historical Studies, 2023; 54(2):330-353
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Amanda Nettelbeck
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Abstract
Recent discussion in Australia has highlighted how Indigenous citizenship remains troubled by the denial of Indigenous sovereignty. This article takes up a pre-history to these discussions, returning to a transitional period (1830s–1850s) in the Australian colonies when governments worked to activate Indigenous people’s newly-clarified legal status as British subjects. How, in this period, did settler colonial culture envisage Indigenous people’s relation to the law as citizens-to-be of the empire? Focusing particularly upon visual vocabularies of policing and civic order, the article considers how vacillating colonial visions of Indigenous people as ‘new’ British subjects reflected a wider tension between settler culture’s non-recognition of Indigenous law and jurisdiction, and its running disquiet about the insecure terms of British sovereignty.
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© Editorial Board, Australian Historical Studies 2023