Guiding her across difficult borders, Eshrat’s final dream exposes the gap between contemporary Muslim women’s stories and the narratives contained in orientalist histories of Muslim women. Her dreams of crossing the water render visible what both Indian Ocean scholarship and Australian histories often efface: that non-white women move. They not only cross multiple borders, but also tell stories in a particular way to make sense of their travels. Disciplining these stories into progress narratives of ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ does not do justice to the archives of border-crossing women.

Aboriginal women needed government permission to marry non-Aboriginal men. To negotiate a marriage across three legal epistemes, in late July 1926, Lallie’s family accompanied the couple to Mount Morgans’ police station.111

. Sher Khan confided in his Punjabi friend Rahim Bukhsh that ‘my friends give me the shame calling me all sorts of names … through this girl.’87Close Most of the men mocking Sher Khan were Afghans, leading Rahim Bukhsh to reply, ‘I can’t do anything about this as they are your country people.’88Close

As is well documented, the British common law system and its colonial variants systematically put raped women on trial rather than their male attackers, in what Pratiksha Baxi has described as ‘state-sanctioned assault’.67Close With Dr Gertrude Mead’s certificate declaring Shamsulnissa’s sexual organs as ‘virgo intacta’, police did not charge Abraham Mahomet.68

11-year-old Ghulam and 5-year-old Shamsulnissa w

The range of relations denoted by ‘milk’ in legal discourse spanned the word’s wide rane of semantic usages, encompassing the asymmetrical relationships between Allah and Muslim, person and commodity, master and slave, and, as Ali shows, husband and wife.

milk over her sexual organs moved to Morbine. In her critique of marriage, Ali argues that sex is only licit in Muslim legal traditions if men possess a type of gendered milk over a woman’s sexual organs.

dominion (milk).

‘Perooz camel camp’ in the town of Bourke. Morbine had arrived from Peshawar in the Australian colonies in around 1893, establishing a camel business with his brother Paleel.27Close It was in the difficult months after Paleel’s death that Morbine became involved with Myrtle, a student at Bourke Convent School.28Close A month after Myrtle’s fourteenth birthday, she gave birth to Morbine’s son.29Close A Catholic priest at Bourke refused to marry the new parents despite the pleas of Myrtle’s mother. Three weeks later, a Presbyterian minister united Myrtle and Morbine in holy matrimony.3

Erasing the women central to the family genealogies and economies spanning the Indian Ocean, Ho’s analysis is consistent with key texts in this field, offering little insight into the lives and worlds of women in these households or the gendered regimes of power that shaped their histories.

During that first conversation with Reg, I began to understand that while the history of encounters between South Asians and Aboriginal people was riven by various asymmetries, it was nevertheless a long relationship of co-existence at the margins

‘Can you sing?’ he asked me. ‘Sing something from the book.’ Horrified, I desperately asked myself where Lal Zada had gone. Surely it was time to hit the road. Eventually Reg softened his approach. He cajoled me, asking only for ‘a couple of lines.’ I protested, ‘it’s in a much older form of Bengali to what I know! It’s a difficult text. I have no idea how I would sing it.’ He offered to bring his guitar. It turned out that he was a country music singer.22

. The question exposes the inescapable power dynamic at the heart of all ‘research’ encounters with Aboriginal people. I was writing in order to get accreditation as a historian from a university. In the era of native title, when writers are endorsed as ‘experts’ on Aboriginal people and, in particular, on their languages or country, scholarly testimony and written material presented in courts of law can have disastrous and unexpected results for Aboriginal people.

Unnerved by their gaze, the two women wondered why the men made them bare their light, plump flesh but did not try to touch them. It became evident to the girls that it was ‘palku’, their flesh, their meat, that the men hungered after. They concluded ‘those two want to eat both of us, you and me!’12

With the Ottoman Empire entering the war as a German ally, Musakhan opined that ‘Turkey has of her own foolishness … lost all chances now of remaining an independent Moslem power. … she cannot remain safe from evil influences of the neighbouring military European powers, who are always preparing for bloodshed and plunder.’99Close For Musakhan, the fall of the Ottoman Empire was a necessary step towards building what he called an ‘independent Moslem power’.100

Four years later, on 9 March 1907, whilst delivering a sermon in Zion city John Dowie was ‘struck with paralysis’, according to Ahmadi literature.91Close After several hours of violent spasms, he eventually died. Musakhan was amongst the many letter writers worldwide who informed presses in Chicago, Boston, London, Adelaide, Melbourne, Cape Town and Perth that Dowie’s painful death fulfilled Ghulam Ahmad’s prophecy.

Dowie never travelled to British India, but his calls to ‘Exterminate Islam!’ still caught Ghulam Ahmad’s attention in Punjab.83Close As Dowie wrote in 1900, ‘There is in India a stupid Muslim Messiah who writes to me oft and oft again that the tomb of Jesus the Christ is in Kashmir.’84Close In his correspondence, Ghulam Ahmad repeatedly challenged Dowie to a ‘prayer contest’.85Close Dowie refused to respond, declaring that it was beneath him to ‘answer gnats and flies on whom if I were to stamp my foot I would crush them to death and destruction!’8

Within months, a second batch of fortytwo contracted workers supplied by Moradkhan headed to the Australian colonies.35Close

‘case cost us £360’

‘jury consisting chiefly, if not exclusively, of the personal friends or servants’ of Stuckey unanimously acquitted him.

first child born to white parents’

arriving at blank spaces awaiting imperial penetration,

but also by Tony Abbott’s claims in 2014 that Aboriginal geographies comprised of ‘nothing but bush’ in 1788. In narrating four tracks shaping how people remembered, recorded, and revisited events at on

Adam

: ‘Are they Pioneers or Aliens?’43Close As historian Hsu-Ming Teo has pointed out, the ‘problem’ is that insisting that past Asian travellers were ‘pioneers’ who helped build the Australian nation inserts non-white migrants into settler narratives celebrating the usurpation of Aboriginal land.44

In the context of competing colonial ideologies in British India, Mill’s History was written as an Anglicist/ utilitarian challenge to the orientalist/ Romantic viewpoint of Sir William Jones, an East India Company scholar-administrator who founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784.

One of the most surprising discoveries was that the richest accounts of South Asians were in some of the Aboriginal languages spoken in Australian desert parts. I

his double vision is too much. As Miller points out, the highest incidence of patients suffering from schizophrenia in the United Kingdom has for many years been among migrants from places once colonised by the British Empire.3Close Just as white soldiers are forever imprisoned at the imperial battlefront, the fluorescent halls and walled gardens of Australian mental health units are likewise haunted by non-white people, some once colonised, many still colonised.

Western states cannot bomb, exploit, drone, invade and kill South Asians and have us as part of their citizenry at the same time. The migrant story I had inhabited for much of my life buckled, and eventually collapsed.