The story of the extended encounter between Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of the British colony at Sydney, has often been told as both emblematic and predictive of the history of British possession of Australia, and of Aboriginal dispossession. Historians such as Grace Karskens and Keith Vincent Smith have peeled back the layers of this narrative to find ways of telling more complex, contextualised, and open-ended stories. Fullagar reaches a new stage in this journey, and the journey of Australian history more generally. She offers a fresh perspective on Bennelong and Phillip, on the nature of their exchange and the broader currents in which they swam.

Fullagar writes the history of these two men backwards, beginning with their deaths and burials in 1813 (Bennelong) and 1814 (Phillip) and with analysis of their surviving next of kin. She then plots events towards and beyond their births, revealing their defining characteristics and the unfolding changes that shaped their respective worlds. Fullagar does this to better understand the context of each man’s life, and the relative importance for each life of the time they spent together. She also wants to break free from the ever-forwards idea of progress, in itself a European narrative form that shaped the idea of British colonisation and, more specifically, Phillip’s own sense of rationalism. As Fullagar observes, European historians have helped to ‘license imperial injustices by presenting them as the necessary if sad cost of modernity itself’, a historiographical project that took off in earnest not long after the two men’s deaths. Going backwards may not bring us closer to how Bennelong and his people understood time and the past, Fullagar admits, but at least it sets his and Phillip’s histories into an ‘equally unfamiliar framing’. Most importantly for this pair of intertwined stories, going backwards shucks off the sense of inevitability that has skewed our understandings of Phillip’s life to some extent, and Bennelong’s. Going backwards takes some additional effort for the reader, but most of it is productive in the way Fullagar hopes it will be.