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Publication Date October pre-release.
September release this month. Older than 12 months. Relevance Popularity Latest Additions Title: A to Z Title: Z to A Pub Date: New to Old Pub Date: Old to New Price: Low to High Price: Not available to public. Usually ships working days — This title is in stock at publisher. There are reasons to be grateful that Australia has lacked the national self-confidence conferred by a founding tale of pilgrim fathers making their home in a promised land under the protection of divine providence.
A creation story centred on convicted criminals being exiled to an unfathomable, faraway country has undoubtedly made for a less crudely celebratory conquest of a continent. However, Australia has also been diminished by its circumscribed founding story.
What depth of meaning would be added to Australia Day barbeques if they reminded people of the cross-cultural campfire feasts of ? Despite the newfound prominence of 26 January, what remains remarkable about the British settlement of Australia is how few consequential stories have been told about it. The cultural legacy of two hundred years of storytelling amounts to little more than a vague association between those early years and hungry convicts, incompetent soldiers, fanciful flag-raising, failed crops and a hostile environment.
There are signs of change. A recognition that, from the Aboriginal perspective, Australia Day marks Invasion Day has taken hold. The historical scholarship in the s and s that challenged what the anthropologist W. Stanner called the Great Australian Silence brought to the fore what had been widely known in the nineteenth century—that settlement sometimes meant a bloodbath. But if the debate about the past has sometimes been reductive, it is not the fault of the Australian historians who laboured from the mids to explain the complexity of the frontier. This scholarship on encounter, adaptation and resistance did not contradict the tragic story of violence and dispossession but instead humanised it.
The work of most academic historians is, however, little read, and at the time of the great reconciliation walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge in replicated on other bridges across the nation , the past was widely thought of only as a problem to be overcome.
The tendency to identify Aboriginal people exclusively as victims and the white settlers as all-powerful, immutable imperialists made for a rupture between the contemporary reconciliation project and history. What was needed for the past to inform the present was an accessible founding story centred on real human beings: Inga Clendinnen was a latecomer to Australian history. Raised in Geelong in the s and s, she had a long and distinguished academic career at Melbourne and La Trobe universities in Mesoamerican studies.
After illness forced a premature retirement from her chosen field there could be no more research trips to Mexico , Clendinnen became enthralled by the journals of George Augustus Robinson, the first Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District, which became Victoria. Would you like to report poor quality or formatting in this book? Click here Would you like to report this content as inappropriate?
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