ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on white-signed histories of Australia, including feminist ones, and explores that white women had never known a desire for Aboriginal men. Feminist historians have well-documented the place of sexual constraint on white women during the Australian colony's moves towards nationhood, but the eruption of white feminine sexual desire is less familiar, less well observed. To emphasise, as feminist historians have tended to do, the constraint, control and repression of white women's sexual desire, or to refuse to see this sexual desire at all, is to foreclose consideration of that which might be most troubling in some of these women's relations with their others. As the chapter examines that the history of sexual relations between Aboriginal women and white men is marked by the colonial and postcolonial relations in which they take place, so too must people complicate some white women's desire for Aboriginal men, as Victoria Haskins and John Maynard go on to point out.
