Dr Skye Krichauff: A boomerang, apricot pies, a pocketful of porridge and other stories

George Wauchope Cameron arrived in the Wirrabara district in the 1850s. For over fifty years Aboriginal people – the Nukunu – regularly camped on ‘Doughboy Creek’, the land purchased by Cameron in the 1870s. In this paper Dr Krichauff draws on stories of Aboriginal-settler interaction told to her by six of Cameron’s descendants during site visits and interviews. Dr Krichauff shows, by recognising the importance of place – and continuity of people in place – and the degree to which lived experiences (of past and present generations) determine what is remembered, we are better able to analyse and, ultimately, understand, the absence of Aboriginal people in the historical consciousness of mid-northern South Australian settler descendants. Skye Krichauff is a historian and anthropologist who is interested in historical cross-cultural relations and understanding the enduring legacies of colonialism. Her doctoral thesis (conferred in 2015) was a place-centred ethnography which investigated the absence of Aboriginal people in the historical consciousness of settler descendants. Skye has previously worked on an international project 'Social Memory, Historical Injustice', as a history researcher for an Aboriginal community organisation and on various research projects including the compilation of a register of SA and NT Aboriginal‒settler conflict. Nharangga wargunni buggi-buggilu, a rewritten version of Skye’s Masters thesis, was published by Wakefield Press in 2011. Her rewritten doctoral thesis will be published by Anthem Press in early 2017. Recorded on 13 September 2016