Patrick Wolfe (1949–2016)

On 18 February 2016, in the morning, one of the most original, committed, and giving historians of colonialism ceased his work. In Patrick Wolfe’s death, an immeasurable loss has been sustained by those of us thinking about and trying to challenge settler colonialism around the world.

Encountering Patrick for the first time was arresting. All enthusiasm and intensity, wisdom and warmth, with a willingness to engage, discuss, and argue. I first met him when I was an undergraduate and was immediately struck by his passion, his generosity, and his extraordinary breadth of knowledge. He was working at Victoria University then, and over time, once we both ended up at La Trobe University, I was lucky enough to work closely with him: first as my PhD supervisor, then as a co-author, and most recently as a friend.

Alongside his personal mark, Patrick made an immense impact on scholarship in colonial history and settler colonial studies. He has given us terms of critique that help both Indigenous people trying to make sense of lives lived on land stolen from them and also those of us thinking through and seeking to transform our place living on that stolen Indigenous land. I want here to pay some small tribute to his pathbreaking work that created a field and generated new possibilities, both in research and, more crucially, in action.

Patrick was born in 1949 in Yorkshire, a descendant of Irish Catholic and German Jewish families, and was raised and educated in the Jesuit tradition. He came to write history late, enrolling as a mature age undergraduate student in Indian Studies and History at the University of Melbourne in the late 1970s where he worked with Sibnarayan Ray and Greg Dening, to each of whom he was deeply indebted. He enrolled in an MSc in Social Anthropology with Maurice Bloch at the LSE, before returning to the University of Melbourne to teach Aboriginal History and to write his PhD with Dening before completing it under the supervision of Dipesh Chakrabarty. Over the past twenty years he was academically itinerant, moving from Melbourne to Victoria University, to La Trobe University, and to a series of fellowships across the United States, from Harvard to Hawai’i, making a substantial mark at each institution.

Patrick’s key contribution to scholarship was in his development of an account of settler colonialism. This was first formulated in an era characterized by a liberalism that ostensibly promised the transformation of Australia towards a new future signified by engagement with Asia and reconciliation

Fig 1.

Patrick Wolfe at Highgate Cemetery, London, March 2011. Photo courtesy of Zora Simic.

with Aboriginal people: a postcolonial turn for White Australia. But Patrick was more compelled by Indigenous intellectual positions, symbolized by Black poet and activist Bobbi Sykes who wrote in 1992:

Post colonial – fiction?‘Post-colonial’ IS fiction.Have I missed something?… Have they gone?¹

This, and innumerable other Indigenous claims, stood as a reminder that as postcolonial theory swept across humanities departments of universities, in the midst of Australia’s ‘decade of reconciliation’, in the year the High Court of Australia recognized native title, there was nothing post about colonialism in Australia.

Critically supportive of moves towards Indigenous justice, Patrick was never taken in by the celebratory mood that prevailed among non-Indigenous liberals in the 1990s. And though his work incubated at the Institute for Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne and he was heavily influenced by postcolonial analysis, he was critical of the triumphalism implicit in much work in the field, of its tendency to turn away from materialist concerns. He considered it to be disabled, in Australia, by its ‘oddly monolithic, and surprisingly unexamined, notion of colonialism’.² Instead, he turned to examine colonialisms in the plural, to trace contingency and difference and to explain why an unending colonialism should structure the writing of Australian Aboriginal history.

In a pair of articles published in 1994 – ‘White Man’s Flour’ and ‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo era’ – Patrick sketched out an account of settler colonialism. In contrast...