Australian children's literature has traditionally provided a space for colonial Australia to perpetuate ideas about segregation, assimilation, and reconciliation. Children's literature offers a complex medium for readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to question and challenge prevalent attitudes, in particular, the notion of "reconciliation." Leading up to the Sydney Olympics in 2000, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation encouraged Australians to "reconcile." After the 2000 Olympics, where both the opening and closing performances made use of symbols and representations of Indigenality, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was disbanded. This "reconciled" sense of place that today's non-Indigenous Australians live in is apparent in the very beginning of colonial Australian children's literature. Late 19th- and early 20th-century non-Indigenous Australian children's literature established binary oppositions that remained influential into the late 1900s. The author argues that these oppositions reveal more about the white Australian's sense of place, or lack of place, than they do about Indigenous knowledge. The purpose of this article is to highlight how representations of Indigenality have been constructed by non-Indigenous authors to accommodate a white sense of place and community. The author shows how non-Indigenous authors have historically interpreted and represented Indigenous peoples and knowledge, and the dichotomies that these have been built upon.