The case of Agnes Jones

Abstract

Sydney’s Aboriginal past has long been eclipsed by its European past. This has been due to the settler-colonial imperatives of Australia’s colonisation, which characterised urban Aboriginal presence as illegitimate and undesirable. Modern discourse has often perpetuated this representation by presenting Aborigines as recent arrivals to the city, thereby denying their historical presence there. This paper challenges this view by recovering the experiences of one urban Aboriginal woman during an understudied period of Sydney’s Aboriginal history: the early twentieth century. Aboriginal Australians living away from official reserves at La Perouse and Sackville Reach are often difficult to locate in the archives throughout this period. This case study has drawn on one of the few bodies of sources which could identify some Aborigines in the city in this period: criminal justice records. It examines what these records can reveal about the everyday life of one marginalised, ‘criminal’ Indigenous woman, demonstrates how these records help us to understand her life beyond the realm of criminal justice, and attests to a resilient and dynamic Aboriginal presence in the city.This article has been peer-reviewed.