Natural History, Ludwig Leichhardt and Queer White Desire

Abstract

This paper considers the ways in which race, sexuality and natural history come together in the descriptions of Ludwig Leichhardt, an early German explorer of Australia. Taking a particular example from Leichhardt’s letters where he describes an Indigenous Australian man in great detail and compares his blackness favourably against the white men he has seen in the Paris public baths, the paper considers the ways these descriptions have been understood as both marks of Leichhardt’s homosexuality and his romantic inclination within the larger colonizing work Leichhardt was participating in. The sensual and aesthetically charged descriptions that Leichhardt produced were acts of colonial control that isolated Indigenous peoples from Country while denying them agency. At the same time these descriptions when shared with other particular white men introduced a queer white strand to the colony that was influenced by the long European histories of idealizing ‘natural’ beauty.