I want to start this chapter from the map of Australia that hung above my desk for more than 2 years, while I was collecting data on how different industries and institutions had impacted on the formation of Aboriginal families. Made by Warraimaay historian Vicki Grieves, the map showed, overimposed on the various typographical symbols of the land, the various settlement stages that occurred across the continent since the intrusions of British settler colonialism. Obvious as this might be due to the country’s sheer size, Australia was not ‘conquered’ swiftly (despite what some settler framings might have suggested), but was colonised in a patched, gradual and fragmented fashion. As Far Country (1982) made me see, the conquest of Australia materialised through a long litany of failed investments, development failures, political compromises, discarded migration schemes, trade negotiations, court litigations and, above all, the yoking of labour to ‘white possessive logics’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) that prioritised a property-centred relationship to land ownership (xi–xii). Within this logic, the labour necessary to turn the land into property—here understood as voluntarily exerted by white settlers—has indeed been collectively glorified as the foundation of settler colonial belonging to the land, or, echoing what other scholars have observed about the ‘Australian legend,’ it represented the process by which ‘Aboriginality was displaced within white indigeneity’ (Cahir et al., 2017, p. 5).