This book discusses how the relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ‘Australia’ were imagined in Australian painting over the previous two hundred years. My aim is to do more than trace a particular theme in the history of Australian painting; it is to tell a story of the invention of an Australian subjectivity.

The purpose of my interpretative history is to test an argument, not provide a comprehensive account of Australian painting. My analysis of paintings and, at times, other forms of expression, is presented as evidence that, in Australia, the colonising culture invested far more in indigenous aspects of the place than they have been willing to admit. The relevations of Elizabeth Durack's and Leon Carmen's Aboriginalised alter egos are only the most recent examples of the desire by the colonising culture to be white Aborigines. This desire, sanctioned by the doctrine of terra nullius, forms a disturbing and even obsessive undercurrent in Australian mythologies of identity. It is an unresolved social issue and shows every sign of remaining so for a long time.

The tracking of the representation of indigenity in Australian painting involves more than investigating those paintings which include images of Aborigines – particularly since the relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines have been, and still are, primarily governed by issues of land ownership. Further, the psychology of representation and its stagings in allegory and other symbolic forms, along with an understanding of the concepts which inform Western thinking about identity, are important to my discussion.