In Chapter 1, I argue that ‘wildness’ is a product settler attempts to understand and thereby spatially remake the Northern Australia since the first colonial encounters in the 17th Century. For European explorers, a region like Cape York Peninsula was a wilderness to be surveyed, and through the misadventures and conflicts of inland expeditions it came to be understood as ‘wretched’ country populated with ‘treacherous’ peoples. Surveying subsequent uses of ‘the wild’ in this region, this chapter shows that if, on the one hand, part of the settler project has been to discursively and materially dictate the shape and texture of the region through such forms of wildness – ‘wilderness,’ ‘wild time,’ ‘wild blacks’ and ‘wild whites’ – then, on the other, the contemporary ‘wilderness’ should be understood not only as a product of the resistance and resilience of its Indigenous peoples, but also as the partial failure of this project.
The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Boston, African Studies Center), XXXVI (1), 2003, ISSN : 03617882, no spécial, Jeanne Marie P envenne (ed.), « Colonial Encounters Between Africa and Portugal »