This course explores Australia’s Indigenous histories and their contemporary resonance. It offers students an overview of relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples, focusing on contact zones and tracing some of the ways Indigenous people have made their own histories in varied contexts of violence and settler colonialism. The course material will cover nineteenth century Indigenous travellers and Indigenous judicial proceedings, examine violence and friendship, study reserves and resistance, and historicise displacement and the many novel articulations of land rights. Students will engage with controversies attached to representing Indigenous histories in the present, and complete in-depth and independent historical research.