During preliminary telephone conversations and on the information sheet which was subsequently sent, I described to potential interviewees my particular interest in hearing stories or information about nineteenth- century Aboriginal people. However, rarely during interviews did settler descendants refer to Aboriginal people without direct questioning or prompting. At some stage I would ask interviewees if they remembered or had ever heard stories about Aboriginal people living or working on their property or in the district, if they had ever come across any signs of Aboriginal occupation and what they thought happened to the Aboriginal people of the district. The overwhelming majority had no stories of Aboriginal people and appeared to have given little thought to this aspect of the past.

George Cameron arrived in the Wirrabara district in the 1850s. Billy Dare arrived in the North- Eastern Highlands in the 1840s. Both men are remarkable in that they are known to have had congenial relations with Aboriginal people. In this chapter I draw on interviews conducted with descendants of these men. The (rare) stories of settler– Aboriginal interaction I heard during my research can be conceptualised and analysed as paradigmatic of the ways settler descendants know and understand the colonial past. Drawing on the philosophising of Giorgio Agamben, a paradigm can be understood as a single element within a set (or a group) made up of elements (people) who commonly adhere to a set of values and principles. The single element serves as a common example and ‘permits the formulation of a specific and coherent tradition of inquiry’. As an example of the example, a paradigm can usefully establish and make intelligible a broader historical problematic context. If, how, when and why George Cameron's and Billy Dare's descendants speak of their forebear's interaction with Aboriginal people is enlightening. Their narratives demonstrate how Aboriginal people are made sense of in settler descendants’ historical consciousness; how they sit within or outside settler descendants’ social context; whether Aboriginal people are part of the present in settler descendants’ consciousness; and how settler descendants draw on these stories to interpret their lives and the wider world.