Love and the stranger: Intimate relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in a very remote Aboriginal town, northern Australia

Abstract

Intimate relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people have generally been pursued within the transactional modalities afforded by economy and kinship (e.g. Hamilton 1972; Tonkinson 1990; Redmond 2005). A parallel anthropological literature (e.g. Myers 1979; Venkatesan et al . 2011), however, has critiqued these emphases, and has instead highlighted the need to consider the emotional experiences of individuals. One of the types of individuals considered here is the stranger, a figurative character that Simmel (1950: 403) described as ‘no owner of soil’. In this paper I explore the experiences of one of these strangers, ‘Andrew’, a non‐Aboriginal man who was the partner of an Aboriginal woman and living in the remote Aboriginal town of Mornington Island in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. In interpreting Andrew's experiences, I argue for an analytic frame based on understanding how transformative personal encounters including love can bring together and sustain relationships between those of (sometimes) vastly different socio‐cultural backgrounds.