Time, empire and resistance in settler-colonial Victoria

This article addresses the role of time as a locus of power and resistance in the context of 19th-century European colonialism. It adopts the case-study of the British settler-colony of Victoria, Australia, to illustrate the manner in which colonization entailed, as well as territorial conquest, the subversion of conflicting attitudes to time. It is argued that whilst the colonization of ‘Aboriginal time’ aided the broader economic interests of settler-colonialism by helping to absorb the Indigenous presence within the temporal landscape of colonial society, time also functioned as a tool for Indigenous resistance and cultural negotiation.