The Treadmill of Identity: Treading Water, Paddling like a Duck but still in the Same Pond

Examining the history and current state of defining what is an Aborigine in the landscape of Australian political affairs is a chronicle which is long and complex. The interests of Australia’s original peoples in these discussions are also complex and it is proposed here, shaped by notions of strategic essentialisms and exclusion from the modernity project. To understand some of these complexities, it is critical to identify why and by whom definitions of Aboriginality are generated. Placing definition-making within a context of settler-state motivations, a racial analytic and the requirement for testing a legislated ‘Aboriginality’ being placed onto Aboriginal Australian communities themselves, must also be central. Two major arguments are posited here: first, that a legal Aboriginality exists solely for the management of Indigenous populations to their end of Wolfe’s ‘territoriality’ and Razack’s ‘disposability’; and second, that Indigenous Australians – like other Indigenous peoples around the world – are continually forced to speak to legal Aboriginalities which represent almost none of the interests or challenges they face in their struggle for physical and cultural survival.