Editorial

Abstract

<p>We are pleased to present the first issue of <i>Australian Historical Studies</i> for 2020, the second year of our tenure as editors. We begin the new year with an especially interesting and important collection of essays on' Aboriginal mobilities'. The theme of mobility has become a key facet and focus of imperial and colo-nial history in the last decade, headlined perhaps by Antoinette Burton's and Tony Ballantyne's <i>Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire</i>(2009). The study of Indigenous mobilities has naturally proved profitable in the field of settler colonial studies. The control and surveillance of Indigenous people was critical to the order enforced by settler colonial governments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Accordingly, Indigenous travel and relocation mark the disruption and manipulation of settler systems of control. More importantly, as this field of research shows, Indigenous mobility also demonstrated connection to country, Indigenous inter-polity relations, and Indigenous resistance that was deeply troubling to settler officials. In colonial geographies where spaces were apportioned along racial lines, Aboriginal mobilities had the potential to challenge and dissect power relations. At least some of the impetus for this branch of research has come from outside the discipline, propelled by the work of geographer Sarah Prout Quicke at the University of Western Australia, among others. Recent landmarks in this field include the col-lection edited by Rachel Stand field in 2018 for ANU Press, <i>Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes</i>. We are pleased to note that two of the contributors here, Katherine Ellinghaus and Rachel Stand field, were recently awarded funding under the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects scheme to continue their explorations of Aboriginal mobilities and agency.</p>