Abstract
This article presents a summary of the author's Bachelor of Arts Honours dissertation, seeking to create a scaffold for further research into late-19th-century cultural contact between North Queensland Aborigines and Chinese migrants. Anglo- Celtic metanarratives continue to dominate Australian historiography with monocultural, economic and political continuities founded on European epistemologies and ontologies. With few exceptions, 19th-century-cultural-contact debates centre the Anglo-Celtic migrants' experiences with IndigenousAustralians and non-Anglo-Celtic migrants. However, such historiography infers an inaccurate standpoint centring the Anglo-Celts' host status, and excludes a third significant contact experience between Indigenous Australians and non-European migrants. This is understandable, given the extant written evidence has been overwhelmingly created and preserved by Europeans to serve white-Australia's Anglo-Celtic perspective. Therefore, a more inclusive reconstruction of cultural contact, recognising differences and equality, requires the application of inductive analysis with a focus on discontinuities, in order to identify the events influencing the creation of the preserved evidence. Quandamoopah scholar Karen Martin's (2008) relatedness theory is applied as a framework exemplar, offering a new vocabulary that shifts perspective towards Indigenous agency and viewpoints as the original culture. This methodology is tested in an analysis of events recorded by late-19th-century Europeans in Cooktown, Palmer River and Atherton.