Settler colonialism as seen by children: Catherine Gay, ‘Children as parties of encounter on Australian frontiers: girls in colonial Victoria, 1835-1856’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism as seen by children: Catherine Gay, ‘Children as parties of encounter on Australian frontiers: girls in colonial Victoria, 1835-1856’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

03Apr25

Abstract: Indigenous-settler relations on antipodean frontiers have been well analysed by numerous scholars, yet the actors and agents are usually framed as adult and often male. Focusing on the Australian colony of Victoria from its invasion in 1835 to the mid-1850s, I position young people as parties of encounter in this contact zone. I focus on three case studies of settler girls with vastly different upbringings who interacted with First Nations communities near their homes. Using contemporary writings, memoir and art, I demonstrate that the complex cross-cultural encounters and relationships formed between Indigenous peoples and settler children could at once reinforce and unsettle settler colonial imperatives. I show that positioning girls as interlocutors and contributors within a settler colonial context illustrates how colonial violence was embedded in domestic domains. However, the connections between Aboriginal peoples and these settler girls could unsettle and resist the negation and elimination of Indigenous sovereignty. By centring settler children’s experiences within the processes of dispossession which characterised the invasion of the Australian continent, this article unsettles understandings of the settler colonial frontier and expands conceptions of who could be an actor in this context.

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