Grace Karskens

People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia by Grace Karskens

November 2020, no. 426

Grace Karskens’s previous book, The Colony (2009), which dealt with Sydney and the Cumberland Plain during the first years of invasion, was one of the great books about the early colonial period in Australia. People of the River is just as important but more profound and risky. In both, Karskens has found ways, brilliantly original ways, of taking in entire populations, and she is particularly good with webs of human connection and patterns of movement. Her focus on multi-centred relationship belongs to the twenty-first century, an age which is beginning to rethink the human individual as an interlinked being, a creature shaped by circumstance and by connection.

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Nah Doongh’s Song

by Grace Karskens •

August 2019, no. 413

Nah Doongh was among the first generation of Aboriginal children who grew up in a conquered land. She was born around 1800 in the Country near present-day Kingswood, just south-east of Moorroo Morack, Penrith, and she lived until the late 1890s ...

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2019 Calibre Essay Prize winner: Grace Karskens

by Australian Book Review •

Competitions and programs

A survey of environmental writing

by Australian Book Review •

October 2017, no. 395

To complement our coverage of new books on the subject, we invited a number of writers, scholars, and environmentalists to nominate the books that have had the greatest effect on them from an environmental point of view.

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The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales by Anna Johnston

by Grace Karskens •

October 2011, no. 335

Grace Karskens reviews 'The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales' by Anna Johnston

‘A MISSIONARY ARRESTED! A LONDON MISSIONARY ARRESTED!!’ These alarming words were trumpeted in the Sydney Gazette in 1828, and they shout from the back cover of Anna Johnston’s The Paper War. Readers might be forgiven for assuming that this book is about scandals in early colonial Australia – all the more entertaining for involving clergymen. And in a way it is, for the man arrested, Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, is the book’s central character. His endless battles with his peers and superiors via the printed, written, and spoken word are a major focus of this book.

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The Colony: A history of early Sydney by Grace Karskens

by John Hirst •

September 2009, no. 314

John Hirst reviews 'The Colony: A history of early Sydney' by Grace Karskens

This is not so much a history of Sydney as a tour with a sensitive and alert guide who knows her history. The site is modern Sydney. Although Sydney was only just beginning to develop suburbs when the book ends – in the 1820s – Karskens tours the whole of the Cumberland Plain, the area that metropolitan Sydney now covers. For the modern suburbs, as everywhere else, Karskens describes the land and how it was used when occupied by the Aborigines and the first Europeans. She points to what remains from earlier times in the routes of roads, remnant vegetation, the built environment and place names.

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Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood by Grace Karskens

by Robyn Annear •

September 1999, no. 214

Robyn Annear reviews 'Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood' by Grace Karskens

On getting hold of Grace Karskens’s new book, I went straight to the colour plates of artefacts resurrected from the neighbourhood of the title, part of the historic Rocks area of inner Sydney. I love to look at salvage: pieced-together dinner plates, dolls’ heads, and brass buckles and buttons whose verdigris defies any amount of elbow grease. But the photo that really grabbed me was of a dug-up gold wedding ring, modelled on one finger of a hand neatly manicured but for a crescent of black dirt embedded deep under the thumbnail. To me, that minute trace of the Rocks neighbourhood spoke vividly – more so, somehow, than any of the scrubbed-up artefacts – of the peculiar joys of dabbling in other people’s cesspits and of the adventure into history that underlies Inside the Rocks.

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The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney by Grace Karskens

by Geoffrey Bolton •

September 1997, no. 194

Geoffrey Bolton reviews 'The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney' by Grace Karskens

‘The historical aspects of The Rocks should not be oversold’, declared a recent Sydney Cove Authority strategic plan, ‘it should be used as a background’. In this sanitised heritage precinct, tourists might thrill to the hint of a raffish past, but should be shielded from more intimate and disturbing glimpses. This is always easy in the absence of systematic research.

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