ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the culture contacts in Australia. It focuses more on Aboriginal involvement in European colonial institutions. In a vastly different environment the arid desert of Central Australia the archaeological sites in and around Killalpaninna mission indicate how Aboriginal people here responded to the mission. The rock shelter of Djulirri in eastern Arnhem Land is extraordinary, for few sites on earth reveal human perceptions of the world around them in one location for this expanse of time. Wybalenna was a settlement created for Tasmanian Aborigines by the British on the remote Flinders Island. It is well known as one of the earliest Australian sites of culture contact to be studied archaeologically. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in a space of fifty years. In the colony of Victoria, missions were an important aspect of nineteenth-century colonization, land invasion, and cross-cultural interactions.
