Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter is a conclusion that summarises the key ideas of the book: that the press was an international site of textual contest over the meaning of settler colonies; that the potential to understand the historical anxieties plaguing the colonies can be gauged from a close reading of these debates; and that we must understand broader historical circumstances to grasp the changes in how the colony and the metropole identified with, challenged, or depended on one another. It stresses the need to take seriously the emotional aspects of settler and language, and suggests that this and the lasting obsession with Australian martial involvement had much to do with overcoming a colonial history of violence and Aboriginal dispossession, and vindicating the inheritance of governance over the Australian continent.