Considering the ways in which Aboriginal art is collected and conceptualised, Morgan Thomas argues that recurrent “mythologies or culturalisms-particularly the fetishisation of Aboriginal art and culture-are themselves forms of colonialism. More than this, perhaps, they are also indications of how closely some current versions of postcolonialism approximate the colonialism that they set out to supersede” (83). If the colonial is indeed worked thus inextricably into the postcolonial, then that indissolubility threatens the ethical exemption naming oneself “postcolonial” grants not only to professional critics and academics working in indigenous studies but also to settler nations as they renegotiate their monocultural pasts to suit the multicultural present. Thomas asks whether we exist as confidently as we have assumed on the virtuous side of the great divide between societies explicitly fashioned by empire and those that have remade themselves after empire, and uses this ethical upsetting to critique the current fashionableness of Aboriginal art and the poverty of the anthropological terms in which it is discussed and marketed. But what happens if we turn the question around so that, instead of finding the lineaments of colonial attitudes beneath the language of enthusiasm for the indigenous, we ask whether the postcolonial was already present in the colonial?

The arguments surrounding empire were articulated at times in terms that anticipate later criticism of empire. It is easy enough to find examples of colonial administrators and settler intellectuals concerned about the fate of aboriginal peoples, missionaries whose faith trembled as they crossed into the world of the other, white riffraff who “went native” and became inadvertent culture heroes in the process.