Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s 1838 poem “The Aboriginal Mother” memorialised an affective settler poetics of affective identification with Indigenous survivors of an infamous massacre. Controversial at the time, the poem inspired vociferous community debate in the 1830s and 40s, and was then largely forgotten until its recovery by Elizabeth Webby in the 1980s. Recently, scholars in Indigenous studies, Romantic literature, Australian music history, and postcolonial and settler colonial studies have re-examined the poem’s various meanings, affiliations, and political implications. This paper situates the poem’s production, circulation, and later critical afterlife within a broader consideration of Dunlop’s archive. If we understand Eliza Dunlop as a precursor to later settler women writers such as K. Langloh Parker, it is certainly possible to hold her representations of Aboriginal people and cultures to account for cultural appropriation.  Yet perhaps it is more productive to utilise Dunlop’s archive to map the ‘critical geography’ of the settler imagination, as Jeanine Leane suggests of later settler historical fiction featuring Indigenous presence. Dunlop’s poetic and linguistic work provides insight into efforts to record and commemorate Indigenous suffering consequent to colonial violence, and allows us to explore the complex relationship between humanitarian concerns and nascent human rights.