When the first boatloads of British settlers disembarked in Sydney Cove in early 1788, they carried the artefacts, implements and practices of late 18th-century literacy into Indigenous Australian life-worlds. Aboriginal people were using several modes of graphic signification, in rock paintings and engravings, on message-sticks, and in the ground drawings that accompanied oral storytelling. The clans around Sydney Harbour painted images of birds, sea creatures and animals, as well as abstract designs on rock, bark, wooden weapons, animal skins and human bodies. In addition, piercing, scarification and other inscriptions of the body were used to signify the wearer’s identity, intention, social affiliations and level of religious initiation. Important also were the fleeting, intangible ‘logograms written into the air’, the ceremonial dance movements central to Indigenous religious practice, and the hundreds of readable hand signals and other body movements necessary for silent communication while hunting, or to convey information to people out of earshot.

Not all modes of signification were practised in all parts of Australia. Indigenous cultures differ from region to region. Yet everywhere, whatever combination of signifying systems was used, Aboriginal people had for thousands of years been engaged in practices of communication and storing and retrieving information that might broadly be called writing and reading. Consequently, for Indigenous Australians, the arrival of the British in 1788 did not trigger a shift from Aboriginal orality to European literacy, but rather an entanglement between radically different reading and writing cultures. As Aboriginal people assimilated European material culture into their life-world without a set of instructions, the implements of inscription and the characters of the roman alphabet were ‘not what they were made to be by Europeans but what they have become’ in the eyes of Aboriginal people.