Since the 1970s Aboriginal biographies have revealed Indigenous experiences of governmental intervention as well as poverty and racism in the 20^th century. These insights into Indigenous lives arguably contributed to wider understandings of Aboriginal perspectives, and to growing support for Indigenous rights and reconciliation. However, writing the biographies of Aboriginal people who lived during earlier periods has been recognised as more challenging. This is primarily because of our reliance on western sources which often detail particular moments in an individual’s life, and can be inflected with cultural misunderstandings and colonial antipathy. Consequently, for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we have biographies of relatively few Aboriginal people such as Bennelong, Trugernanner, and Nathaniel Pepper. Yet, biographical approaches can enhance nineteenth-century Aboriginal history by recognising Indigenous historic figures not as collectives – “natives”, “blacks”, “Aborigines” - but as individuals, with distinct personalities, interests and perspectives. In this paper I trace the challenge and benefits of biographical approaches for Aboriginal history, and argue for the need to reconsider what biography is when it comes to Aboriginal history, in particular its form and scale, by re-thinking how, and how much of, an individual’s life needs to reconstructed in order to be considered as biography.