Burning Daylight: Staging Asian-indigenous history in Northern Australia

Multicultural Australia did not begin, as is generally held, in the 1970s with the official demise of the White Australia policy. Northern Australia was a multicultural place where Asians and Aboriginal communities traded, coexisted, and procreated prior to the British presence on the continent.² Yet, within the larger context of settler Australian history, there is still the perception that Asians and Aboriginals do not have much in common. The Australian story is largely constructed in terms of black/white race relations. According to Regina Ganter, the non-British histories of Australia have "never been unknown, but they have also never been privileged into the master narrative of domestic histories." The histories have been conveniently forgotten because they do not extend British history, and are thus, "not remembered very hard."³