Precarious Subjects: Picturing Indigenous British Subjecthood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Australia

Nettelbeck, A.2023-06-162023-06-162023Australian Historical Studies, 2023; 54(2):330-3531031-461X1940-5049https://hdl.handle.net/2440/138726Recent 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.en© Editorial Board, Australian Historical Studies 2023Precarious Subjects: Picturing Indigenous British Subjecthood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century AustraliaJournal article10.1080/1031461X.2022.21303802023-06-16646455Nettelbeck, A. [0000-0001-7099-6075]