SOURCE: Sheridan, Susan. “‘Wives and Mothers Like Ourselves, Poor Remnants of a Dying Race’: Aborigines in Colonial Women's Writing.” Kunapipi 10, nos. 1-2 (1988): 76-91.

In the following essay, Sheridan traces the principal themes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's writing regarding Aborigines and the related contexts of racial and sexual difference.

The bicentenary of invasion and settlement, 1988, challenges non-Aboriginal Australians as never before to confront and analyse the racism that pervades hegemonic cultural discourses and practices. Looking back to the noisy decades around the turn of the twentieth century, the crucial formative period of modern Australian cultural nationalism, one is struck by the silence of and about Aboriginal people. White Australians' exclusion of Aboriginals has been, I would argue, crucial to our self-constitution as ‘Australian’—an identity, a unity, whose meaning derives from its discursive displacement of the ‘other’ race, just as its power as a nation state...