Colonisation, violence and ethics: Resisting settler colonial erasure on Dja Dja Wurrung Country

This thesis explores how violence and ethics have played out in the colonisation of Dja Dja Wurrung Country, in central Victoria. Through the interplay between oral history and archival research, it traces the history of Dja Dja Wurrung people since colonisation until the present day, and addresses some of the ethical challenges raised by this colonisation. The thesis demonstrates how settler colonisation has operated through a doubled violence of erasure that functions as a kind of ‘death work’, and is also concerned with the various forms of ‘life work’ carried out by Dja Dja Wurrung which struggle against this erasure.