First Nations Australians in the Nineteenth-Century Italian Imaginary

Abstract

In this article, a migration historian, a Dja Dja Wurrung storyteller, and a long-time local combine their insights to analyse an encounter on the colonial frontier between a Clan of the Dja Dja Wurrung, on their Country, and the Italian Raffaello Carboni, the summer before he took a leading part in the Eureka uprising. Gilburnia, the long-lost pantomime Carboni published back in Rome two decades later, is hitherto unrecognised evidence of the cultural exchange that took place on the banks of the Loddon in central Victoria during the warmer months of 1853–54. In Gilburnia, Carboni attempted to share for an Italian audience what he had learned from his Dja Dja Wurrung hosts; the Dja Dja Wurrung appear to have welcomed this stranger into their Country and enveloped him in their storytelling.