Book discussion - 'Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia'

This event consists of speakers discussing Professor Ann McGrath's latest book 'Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia'.

Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia.

Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between indigenous peoples and colonisers in times of nation formation.

The book sheds new light on how coloniser states were constituted, and how certain marriages and their children were classed as illegitimate and illicit. Reserves severed the marital middle ground and wrenched families apart.

Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and came to embody the contradictions of imperialism.

This study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonising peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.