AustLit

This paper theorises a discourse of settler homelands in which a dichotomy of lived interior and exterior was transferred to ideas of racial difference. Settlers depended on a range of perceptual relations, of looking, documenting and publishing, to convey a notion of racial asymmetry through the divide of built and ‘undeveloped’ surrounds. Settlers carefully observed the ‘landmarks’, or spatially-grounded signs of difference, often blind, or unable to assimilate the marks of Indigenous habitation to their systems of knowledge. These perceived differences of dominion were central to legitimating a discourse of settler homelands and to discrediting Indigenous tenure.