ABSTRACT
Those of us who attended the ‘Southern Spaces’ conference in June 1993 were gathered in London, a metropolitan centre far from South Africa and Australia and yet historically and culturally connected to both places. It was a time of transition in South Africa, when the worst years of the struggle against apartheid, and the necessary isolation, were in the past and the structures of the new political order were being earnestly hammered into shape. In late 1992, the High Court of Australia had overturned the historical and judicial foundations of land ownership in Australia, recognizing that indigenous peoples had prior claim to lands colonized by the British; months later the Native Title Act would be passed. It seemed the appropriate moment, in this climate of momentous political change, to look again at the numerous features that united and separated South Africa and Australia. These two southern spaces, once part of the British Empire, had much in common: their similar latitudes, their arid, fragile interiors, and their shared settler myths of the ‘empty land’ and policies of white racial domination. Yet there were also divergences in the histories of colonization, the articulations of resistance to the imperial presence by the indigenous inhabitants, and the complex modernity and unitary nationhood of these two settler sites.
