ABSTRACT
Stories of white ‘captivity’ in Australia emerged from, and reflected, settler anxieties about racial and gendered interactions in Australia, and within the colonial world more broadly, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such narratives were always located on the edges of white settlement, in that peculiar colonial space of the frontier. While the parameters of Australian frontiers were constantly shifting as European control of the continent expanded, the frontier was always a culturally contested buffer zone or, in Mary Louise Pratt’s terms a, ‘contact zone’ that separated European civilization from unknown, and as yet unconquered, lands and peoples. Pratt writes that taking a ‘contact’ perspective of the frontier treats the relations between the colonizers and colonized ‘in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power’.1 On the Australian fringes of European settlement where the ownership of territory was disputed, the dynamics of black and white interactions were, as Pratt suggests, remarkably complex and diverse.2
