ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Aborigines as a category and the way in which that category has been ‘assimilated’ into a national historiography. It provides a discussion on Aboriginal-European interaction in the early European occupation of the Perth area. The chapter questions the general application of the dispossession-resistance interpretation of Aboriginal responses and suggests that accommodation with Europeans was something for which Aborigines strove. In his analysis of nineteenth-century West Africa, for example, Ronald Robinson described the way in which the European presence became an important variable in the indigenous political systems of that area. The chapter also suggests that the European presence, particularly during the early period of settlement, was an important new variable in the politics of Aboriginal inter-group relations. Resistance and accommodation can each be seen as forming part of the spectrum of Aboriginal-European relations.
