This subject explores the history of Aboriginal peoples in Australia, with a focus on the British colonisation of Melbourne and Victoria. Casting their imaginations from a local to a global scale, students will be asked to consider how the mobility of Aboriginal people was contested and controlled from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Case studies include frontier wars, rural missions, urban activism, and international resistance movements. Doing so, students will explore new theoretical frameworks - histories of place, mobility, and of memory. If people are colonised through the control of their movement, then how has this mattered for Aboriginal people in Australia? And how have Aboriginal people resisted the forces of colonisation? Students will also consider the ways the history of the colonisation of Australia has been remembered, forgotten and performed. The subject will thus equip students with a knowledge of Aboriginal history in and beyond Australia.

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