Unauthorised Voyagers across Two Oceans: Africans, Indians and Aborigines in Australia

Abstract

Considering movements of people between South Asia, Africa and Australia offers an opporrunity to rethink Empire and more broadly to question the way we have understood the meaning of land and landscapes. In Australia, until the mid-twentieth century, history focused on the distance between the colony of Australia and that of metropolitan Britain, tracing the impact that the enormity of that distance and the duration of travel had in shaping the colony. More recently, historians have focused attention on the links between settler colonies and the movements of ideology, policy, popular culture and people between these colonies of America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and even South America.