Exploring Indigenous and European Responses to Occupation.

Abstract

Exploring the conduct of Bennelong and Musquito provides insight into both collaboration and resistance and the way responses to occupation move between these polarities.

The language of invasion and resistance to describe British intrusion and the Aboriginal response derives from 20th century wartime experience and was intended to alter the portrayal of settlement and to valorise Indigenous reaction.

Collaboration and collusion were largely omitted yet they are a corollary of invasion and resistance. While not comfortable concepts, they nuance Aboriginal response as they do the European experience, confirming a universal human condition and evading Indigenous exceptionalism.