ISBN : 9782296123366
INDIGENOUS VISIBILITY/INVISIBILITY IN AUSTRALIA
In late eighteenth and early nineteenth century descriptions of Australia's Indigenous peoples it is, predictably enough, the distinctive Aboriginal phenotype that excites the greatest attention in the European observer, with the blackness, nakedness, ritual scarring, body-painting, hair-texture, nose ornaments and dental anomalies of the'natives' being singled out for particular comment and emphasis. It does not take long, however, for the incoming Anglo-Celtic population to realise that it is neither physical appearance nor even cultural behaviour that constitutes the most crucial difference between themselves and the'savages'. What distinguishes them above all is the difference in their respective relationships to the space they inhabit. The Aborigine is undeniably at home and in harmony with an ancestral territory of which he knows and reveres every fea...