Displacement and disavowal in Australian settler colonialism

Australian settler colonialism is founded on displacement. As articulated within the emergentfield of settler colonial studies, whereas the objective of colonialism proper is the extractionof surplus value from peripheral territories, settler colonialism has as its object the land itself.Compelled towards territorial sovereignty, the settler project aims to eliminate or at leastdisplace pre-existing indigenous populations in order to supersede them in their connectionwith the land in question. However, it is not only the imperative to eliminate or displace thesovereign indigenous presence which characterises the settler project, but the displacement ofsettlers themselves in transferring their sovereign capacity to a new locale. These coconstitutivehistories of displacement are inevitably disavowed by settlers, who attempt toconstruct themselves as autochthons in their quest for legitimation. This paper will offer ananalysis and critique from a settler colonial studies perspective of a range of settler strategiesof denial and disavowal in the face of the persistently unsettling sense of displacementinherent within the Australian settler colonial situation