The ‘little empire of Wybalenna’: 1 Becoming Colonial in Australia 2 Anna Johnston The colonial past is hot property in Australian public life at present. Debates throughout the 1990s about ‘black armband’ history versus ‘white blindfold’ history, about histories of land use and ownership, and about what constitutes ‘mainstream’ Australian historical scholarship seem to have coalesced in the arguments surrounding Keith Windschuttle’s publications. In this most recent set of history wars, some Australian historians seem to feel under siege. 3 Others, as Nicolas Rothwell suggests, see this as a breath of life for the discipline, reasserting the centrality of history even as it calls into question the authority and reliability of historians. 4 These debates draw such heat because they are ultimately about the relationship between the colonial past and what might be called the ‘postcolonial’ present. It is at once a debate about history as a discipline and a debate about how historical understandings affect our present: as Graeme Davison suggests, history has become ‘a bone of national contention’. 5 If arguments about ‘the past’ are those we can leave to the historians, it remains for interdisciplinary scholarship to think differently about this historical scrum, to draw different lessons from such cultural contests. Questions about ‘the colonial’ are particularly interesting, for the ‘colonial-ness’ of the colonial past rarely attracts much attention in historical skirmishes. What did ‘colonial’ mean in the past? How did past settler Australians understand their experience as ‘colonial’? How do we, as postcolonial subjects, know what colonial identity was — when did it start, when did it finish, what were its constitutive elements? The argument about whether Australia is ‘really’ postcolonial has been widely canvassed; 6 as Peter Hulme wryly notes, ‘There are only two controversial parts to the word ‘postcolonial’ — one is “post” and the other is “colonial”’. 7 Robert Blair St George’s Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (2000) provides the framework for this article. St George argues that ‘new pasts [can] reveal the cultural processes of becoming colonial’, and that such pasts are ‘creatively invented rather than “discovered” in the arid climate of the archive’. 8 Thinking about ‘becoming colonial’ places emphasis on the ‘negotiative processes that characterize symbolic exchange in colonial cultures’; 9 it foregrounds process, interaction, and negotiation. Under such a framework, the colonial archive is revisited not as the ground where historical ammunition is recovered to sustain an ongoing salvo of figures and facts, but as a place where individuals and places emerge in an historically specific but variable and open-ended environment. If the question of when or whether Australia became postcolonial is impossible to answer, what about when (or if) Australia became colonial? This article explores one archival example of subjects ‘becoming colonial’ at a specific site in early Australia. Becoming colonial in early Australia was an intricate process. In America, St George suggests, it ‘involved both vernacular theories of and lived experience of