Enduring the End of the World: Mudrooroo and the Unfinished History of Settlement

Australian cultural identity has often been composed around an ending that would not end. In Van Diemen’s Land, British colonisation drew authority from a rhetoric of extinction: the Palawa were imagined as a “dying race”, their disappearance rendered as melancholy inevitability rather than organised dispossession. This was not merely a bad prediction. It was a political convenience. If Aboriginal people were already vanishing, then invasion could be redescribed as settlement, theft as progress, and genocide as the sombre weather of history. The fiction of extinction allowed the colony to mourn what it was actively destroying.