ABSTRAK Our understandings of the European-Aboriginal contact period are restricted by our limited engagement with and interrogation of the categories used for analysis. Dividing the past into Indigenous, Aboriginal and invader and so on, fails to reveal the complexity and nuances of cross-cultural, negotiated encounters and the emergence of new social formations and identities. Furthermore the ascription of ethnicity to historical actors generally relies on late twentieth (early twenty-first) century conceptions of what it means to be Aboriginal which are not necessarily valid for the period under consideration.