The part of the Aboriginal male body that European explorers found most striking was the skin, or to be more specific, its colour and the fact that so much of it was on display. The Aborigines’ blackness and nakedness was remarked on by all of the navigators, and in some of the earlier accounts little else was discussed, for example the only physical description of the Aborigines attributed to the Dutch voyagers of the Duyfken (1606) was that they were ‘black’. The explorers were at pains to try and accurately describe Aboriginal men's skin colour, though their attempts to reach a consensus on the exact shade were hindered by their wide-ranging referents, and more significantly by various Aboriginal cultural practices such as oiling, blackening and painting their skin. The Europeans were also struck by Aboriginal people's nudity: their unimpeded gaze encouraged a prurient interest in the body which has generally been ignored by historians, but which sheds light on eighteenth-century concerns about modesty, decorum, bodily comportment and the civilizing process. Their attempts to examine Aboriginal skin also introduced the Europeans to indigenous methods of adorning the skin. Their struggle to comprehend these adornments reveal the difficulties inherent in translating cross-cultural encounters into a European cognitive framework.

Histories of race indicate why the eighteenth-century navigators were so interested in discerning and describing the exact colour of Aboriginal skin. Roxann Wheeler, in her study The Complexion of Race, argues that it was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century that skin colour, rather than rank, civility or religion, became ‘the primary signifier of human difference’ and even then ‘individuals responded variously to nonwhite skin color’. As scholars such as Wheeler and Felicity Nussbaum point out, eighteenth-century representations of skin colour were far from stable and coherent. Nussbaum suggests that the term ‘black’ encompassed a spectrum of eighteenth-century descriptors such as ‘tawny, sallow, olive, mulatto, sooty, and ebony’, and was applied to people of ‘East Indian, West Indian, Pacific Islander, and North and sub-Saharan African’. Despite the instability of discourses on ‘blackness’, these different ‘shadings of blackness’ were thought to ‘convey discernible variations that constitute crucial hierarchies for many eighteenth-century European travellers’.