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In an opinion piece in Hobart's Saturday Mercury Henry Reynolds, the noted historian of Aboriginal-settler Australian relations, raised the contentious issue of identity in respect to Tasmanian Aboriginal people of mixed heritage. 1 In reclaiming and asserting a defiant Aboriginality, many Tasmanian Aborigines (and mainlanders too) obfuscate and/or ignore the fact that they are of mixed descent. Their identity, both cultural and personal, is subsumed into a proclaimed Aboriginality. Reynold's proposal that such people (in Tasmania anyway) might better be described as Creole drew the expected voices of dissent. For many of those proclaiming Aboriginality, Aboriginality constitutes both the sum and total of who they are and any scrutiny of this assumed identity invariably raises hackles. And there is good reason for this. Descendants of miscegenation, often conceived through violence, were for long the subjects of ostracism, concern and administrative contumely. At various points they were described as inheriting the worst characteristics of both races, as being irretrievably trapped in the chasm betwixt two cultures, as having no culture at all, and always as a problem. In some jurisdictions this led to ever finer and sillier gradations between such descendants so as to more securely locate them within the colonial order, thereby effecting greater administrative control. Descendants of mixed heritage were not granted the liberty to exist in their own complex right. They were instead conceived of as a group to whom things needed to be done in order to provide them with culture and an identity, or alternatively, to rid Australia of their presence. Sterilisation was one of many proposals put forward to effect the latter 2 and assimilation became enacted policy. Little wonder then that many of Australia's indigenous people baulk at the notion of a hybrid identity. While such an identity would have the capacity to 'evad[e] the replication of … binary categories' and allow for the 'develop[ment of] new anti-monolithic models of cultural exchange and growth', 3 it is more widely regarded as a further and calculated denial of the authenticity of one's history, subjectivity and culture. 4 Whilst many remain empathetic to and understand the need of those of mixed descent to 're-present themselves as coherent people with a sustainable historicized subjectivity', 5 the elision of one (or more) cultural and biological heritages in

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