AustLit

Epigraph: India has a long history of connections to Australia. For a start, long before Captain Cook set foot on southern shores, cloth from 'the Indies' had traded its way from Gujerat and Coromandel down through the Indonesian archipelago to be traded with Aborigines by Makassar seamen negotiating seasonal camps to collect trepan, fish and pearl. So far before its beginning as a European outpost of Empire and then white commonwealth of states, Australia was part of a cultural diaspora and economic globalising (Sharrad, 2006: 3)