Theatre or corroboree, what’s in a name? Framing Indigenous Australian 19th-century commercial performance practices

The reception and framing within histories of practice of Indigenous Australian cultural production in the performing arts has been a problematic and contested field for decades. Though, overtime the terms have changed in line with political and social changes and developments, I argue that these shifts have been limited by continuing a priori assumptions about theatre in terms of what it is and the implicit assumptions of European cultural ownership of performances that are
discussed under the term. These conjectures continue to have impact on
what is included, excluded and defined within Australian theatre historiography