Having lived in my family's traditional place for the past five years and following up leads on the history, I have become aware of the immense number of families of mixed race in the area. Many, though not all of them are descended from an Aboriginal woman who married, or was in a long term union with, a non-Aboriginal man. From this area alone the families of McClymont, French, Polly, Bugg and Ward, Jonas, Dates, Fenning, Greenaway, Hoy, with their mixed race beginnings in the early C19th, come to mind. There are many more.

Historians of Australian Aboriginal history have made reference to the colonial subjugation of Aboriginal women in unions with European men that occurred in the colonial period. There is certainly much evidence for this. However, such women would likely continue to behave within their learned cultural base and transmit cultural values and behaviours to their children.

From this, I am interested to explore the hybrid nature of Australian society: are many of the characteristics that we take as being "Australian" and that have been appropriated by the "white" nation, have their origins in an Aboriginal cultural base? Some of these would be transmitted through friendships, work and domestic relationships and intimacies in the colonial period (before the segregating Protection Acts for example) and also through the Aboriginal matriarchs of mixed race families.