From the time Western colonisers forced their way on to Aboriginal lands, they had deemed the humans already here a nuisance. The colonisers had become fixated on wiping my ancestors out. They were hell-bent on destroying Australia’s Indigenous cultures and erasing black peoples from the nation’s psyche. But it is through their official files, documents and journals that our post-contact histories survive.

The colonisers left the perfect paper trail. They were ignorant of the fact that people had lived here for thousands of years. Ignorant of sophisticated Indigenous ways of living that were complete with customs, belief systems, kinship patterns, cultural interactions and trading routes. But not ignorant of a pre-colonial economy, it seems. Our Aboriginal ancestors had worked the Australian landscape in various ways. Their resourcefulness is extolled in those paper trails – the journals of early explorers. Seeds were harvested and stored, fish traps and river dams built and permanent shelters erected that the early colonists noticed, but dismissed, preferring instead to promote Australia’s Indigenous peoples as ‘hunter-gatherers’ roaming the landscape in search of food. A convenient untruth…

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