It is one of the many tragedies of race relations in Australia that history has not allowed for the stories of settlers from the African diaspora. The eliding of  
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[^0]:    20 Victorian Police Gazette 1853-1861 and Victorian Central Register of Prisoners, microfiche, McN1383, National Library of Australia
21 369/1868, Births Deaths and Marriages Registry, Victoria, Australia
22 1720/1874, Births Deaths and Marriages, NSW State Archives and Records, Australia  
African ancestry began very early in Australia's history and has led to widespread misreading of racial identity: an Australian who had colonial antecedents could only be European or Aboriginal. The refusal to acknowledge that Australia began as a multiracial society crystallized with the federation and establishment of the independent Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, which immediately legislated to restrict immigration and expel non-European immigrants. This came to be known as the White Australia policy and lasted until 1973, when laws were passed to ensure that race would be totally disregarded as a factor for immigration to Australia. Two years later, the Racial Discrimination Act made racially based selection criteria unlawful. In the decades since, Australia has maintained large-scale multiracial immigration, but not until the 1990s did this include sizeable numbers of people from Africa. On a global scale, the African diaspora in Oceania is very small and concentrated on the large island continent of Australia. This may seem historically insignificant, but the mere fact that at the end of the eighteenth century Africans made it to the impossibly remote Southern Pacific Ocean is remarkable and indicates both the complexity and the vast scope of the diasporic process.