Australian Squatter Space 1850–1880

Abstract

Young men of empire seeking their fortune in Australia incorporated violence against Indigenous people into their lives as part of leisure. This derived from the persona created by romanticism. Squatters created an emotional community that valued capital at the expense of family and emphasised uniformity, they were a transitory people travelling to England and Europe. They held a specific relationship to the Aboriginal polity in which they lived and a loose and imaginative relationship to government. This paper explores squatter space as they saw it.