ABSTRACT
This chapter explores truck expedition around the circumference of Australia in the late 1920s, a journey that projected the powers and pleasures of urban commodity culture into the vast spaces of the outback. The MacRobertson Round Australia Expedition began in April 1928 with a ritual drawn from the grand era of nineteenth-century exploration. The distinctively settler colonial nature of the MacRobertson expedition is brought into focus by comparing it to an apparently similar African journey three years earlier. More than a trace of the 1928 expedition survives in indigenous storytelling in the northwest, suggesting ways in which Aboriginal people produced their own meanings for these events, even when constrained by the power relations imposed by settler colonialism. In remote settlements in the Northern Territory, Aboriginal audiences laughed uproariously at sequences that were not intended to be funny and added their own voiceovers, which the visitors were unable to understand.
