According to the ledger at the Moolooloo cattle out-station in the Northern Territory, Joe Croft bought Bessie a present.

"Lubras' dress, fancy", the purchase record states in the language of the times.

The woman's surname is not known but she became Bessie Croft. It was true love.

Between the two halves of the couple, there was Irish, Chinese and Aboriginal blood. Two generations later, a result was their granddaughter: Professor Brenda L Croft of the Australian National University, and soon also of Harvard University.

Professor Croft will take the love-story of her grandfather and grandmother to classes in Harvard when she takes up the ultra-prestigious Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at the university.

She straddles disciplines at the ANU. She is an artist, a writer and an historian, currently researching the records of her family as it stretches from the famine of Ireland to the Victorian goldfields to the Northern Territory to Canberra - and to Harvard.

"I want to take the three-plus decades of knowledge I've built up here and share it," she said at the ANU's Menzies Library where she is poring through the cattle-station records.

Those records reveal the love between a white man and a black woman at a time when respect, let alone, love, was rare. Brutality was more like it.

On May 8, 1925, the archive shows that he bought her another dress. On November 11, 1924, he bought one-and-a half "lollies" as well as a third dress. Professor Croft says the records do not show much generosity towards black people at the station - her grandfather was extremely rare in his affection.

Her style is to do accessible history, with a human slant, and she will take that style to the students at what is arguably the most prestigious university in the world. She is a devotee of what's known as Indigenous Storywork where personal experience is a strong part of building up a picture of communities and their history.

Her own background is the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia.

When she takes up the post in Harvard, she also plans to connect with North American First Nations people. She will split her university work between Harvard's departments of history of art and architecture and that of art, film, and visual studies. She'll also be involved with Harvard's Native American program.

READ MORE:

"The opportunity to extend and further develop networks with Native American/First Nations colleagues in their homelands is exciting," she said.

She hoped the connection between Harvard and the ANU would continue after the one year of the the post in Massachusetts.

The professorship is named after Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, and Professor Croft likes the combination.

"I love the fact that it's both gentlemen showing that you can work in a bipartisan community," she said.

Both the Liberal and the Labor prime ministers improved the rights and position of Aboriginal people. Mr Fraser's government passed the Land Rights Act in 1976 and Mr Whitlam's government passed the Racial Discrimination Act as well as land rights legislation.

Brenda Croft also has a very personal reason for relishing her one-year stint Harvard.

Her brother Lindsay was there on a Harkness Fellowship in 1994. He had just finished his stint there when he was killed in a car crash.

In memory, she plans to institute a scholarship for American First Nations students to come to Australia to study and vice versa.

And there is one more reason for great pride: she thinks her father was the first Aboriginal person to go to university in Australia.

Professor Croft will be the first First Nations woman academic to take up the professorship in Harvard.

"We are especially proud to be represented by such a talented Indigenous scholar whose work will do much to communicate the rich culture and history of Australian First Nations people to a US audience," the Dean of the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Rae Frances, said.