On Noongar Boodjah: George Vancouver’s Colonial Fictions

Abstract

This essay reads Captain George Vancouver’s account of his 1791 landing on the southwestern coast of what is now known as Australia through the theorizations and analyses of Indigenous theorists and scholars to expose the colonial fictions that undergird his actions and rhetoric. I then focus on the rhetoric and critical posturing of the settler colonial academy, especially within white-dominated fields like eighteenth-century studies, to consider how its work participates in the processes of Indigenous erasure and points to the need for self-reflexive and reciprocal engagements with Indigenous communities and their knowledges.