Affiliation:
1. Visiting Fellow, State Library of New South Wales, Adjunct Researcher, History and Classics, University of New England, NSW, Australia
Abstract
Early expressions of democracy in one Australian locality emerged from punitive raids by Whites on Aboriginal camps. Such actions occurred side by side with active and imaginative participation in the institutions of the democratic state, which challenged the reach of government. This polity was brought into being amidst confusion, which also created, by its gaps, opportunities for the unenfranchised, such being women and the Aboriginal people. Yet it was also blind to the Aboriginals’ interests and sought to exclude them altogether from the new order being fashioned.