Aboriginal Dreaming Paths and Trading Routes: The Colonisation of the Australian Economic Landscape

by Dr Dale Kerwin

The dreaming paths of Aboriginal nations across Australia formed major ceremonial routes along which goods and knowledge flowed. These became the trade routes that criss-crossed Australia and transported religion and cultural values. This book highlights the valuable contribution Aboriginal people made in assisting European explorers, surveyors and stockmen to open the country for colonisation, and explores the interface between Aboriginal possession of the Australian continent and European colonisation and appropriation. Instead of positing a radical disjunction between cultural competencies, Dale Kerwin considers how European colonisation of Australia appropriated Aboriginal competence in terms of the by tapping into culinary and medicinal knowledge, water and resource knowledge, hunting, food collecting and path-finding. As a consequence of this assistance, Aboriginal dreaming paths and trading routes also became the routes and roads of colonisers. Indeed, the
European colonisation of

256 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2010