ABSTRACT
In 1988, the year in which Australia ‘celebrated’ the bicentenary of its founding as a settler colony, an Aboriginal activist visited Britain. On a windy day on Brighton beach, surrounded by invited journalists, Burnam Burnam raised the Aboriginal flag and declared the British Isles to be Aboriginal territory. This colonial return mimicked Governor Phillip's hoisting of the Union Jack at Sydney Cove on the east coast of Australia 200 years before. Both were symbolic events. The first marked the ‘beginning’ of the British territorialisation of the continent that came to be known as Australia. The second successfully parodied the audacious banality of that event. In 1788 those few Aborigines who witnessed the raising of the Union Jack could not imagine what would happen—to them, to all Aborigines—as a result. In 1988 the millions of Britons to see the media reports of the Aboriginal flag being hoisted on Brighton beach could assume it did not mark the ‘beginning’ of anything much at all. One was an inaugural event which, through the force of desire and sheer might, opened out into a history of colonisation. The other was a memorial event which, despite the force of desire, could neither claim Britain nor undo Australia's history of colonisation. The embedded unevenness of power, which is the legacy of imperialism, meant that these events did their symbolic work in quite different ways. Like these events this book has brought Australia and Britain back into ‘contact’. But this is not a cause- and-effect encounter. It is, like many ‘first contacts’, one in which the two sides see each other, impinge upon each other, but do not recognise the full weight of the histories and geographies implied by their meeting.
