Settler Colonialism
It was a great moment in Australian history when William Cooper walked to the Australian parliament to object to the treatment of Jews in Germany during World War II. At the time, the British and Australian parliaments were ambivalent about the atrocities occurring across Europe ...
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In 1902, Australian feminist and social reformer Vida Goldstein met Theodore Roosevelt in the White House during her North American lecture tour. Marilyn Lake retells the story of their encounter in her important new book. Seizing Goldstein’s hand in a vice-like grip, the president exclaimed: ‘delighted to meet you’. Australasian social and economic reforms attracted Roosevelt and other Americans ...
... (read more)Amanda Nettelbeck reviews 'The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the settlers and the protectors' by Bain Attwood
The Good Country begins in February 1840 with a cross-cultural encounter in Djadja Wurrung country, now central Victoria. Two Protectors of Aborigines, recently appointed to the burgeoning pastoral district around Port Phillip, met with an Aboriginal group camped near Mount Mitchell. At this time, the Aboriginal protectorate had been operating for little ...
... (read more)Catherine Noske reviews 'Terra Nullius' by Claire G. Coleman
It is hard to review a novel when you don’t want to discuss two-thirds of it – not because it is not worth discussing, but because doing so risks undermining the genius of the novel’s structure. The blurb of Claire G. Coleman’s début makes clear that the novel is ‘not [about] the Australia of our history’, but for the first third of the novel, this is not readily apparent ...
... (read more)Brian Matthews reviews 'A Führer for a Father: The Domestic Face of Colonialism' by Jim Davidson
When some years ago I read Jim Davidson’s outstanding biography, Lyrebird Rising (1994), I was initially concerned by what seemed to be his potentially distorting fascination with the scene-stealing Louise Hanson-Dyer. But I soon discovered I needn’t have worried. Jim Davidson is not the sort of biographer whose obsession with his subject overcomes prop ...
Kevin Bell reviews 'The Land is our History: Indigeneity, law, and the settler state' by Miranda Johnson
Australia’s national identity is as complex as the people who make up the nation and the historical forces by which it was made. Our Indigenous peoples, whose unique histories precede the nation’s by more than fifty thousand years, are central to that identity ...
... (read more)Glenn Moore reviews 'Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the making of America' by Michael A. McDonnell
Michael McDonnell knew he had a bestseller on his hands. Historical biographies regularly top the New York Times bestseller list, and his research uncovered a larger than life figure named Charles de Langlade. Born in 1729 to an Indian mother and a French-Canadian father, Langlade grew up straddling two cultures, but that did not stop him from becoming a le ...
Alan Atkinson reviews 'Settler Society in the Australian Colonies' by Angela Woollacott
Free settlement in Australia from 1788 to the 1850s is an old and favourite topic for historians in this country. It has engaged historical imagination for nearly two centuries, starting with William Charles Wentworth’s A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony ...
Richard J. Martin reviews ‘Protests, Land Rights and Riots: Postcolonial struggles in Australia in the 1980s’ by Barry Morris
Protests, Land Rights and Riots examines indigenous politics in New South Wales in the 1980s. The discussion focuses on several protests, including the infamous 1987 ‘Brewarrina riot’, which followed the death of a young Aboriginal man in police custody, as well as a 1990 demonstration against amendments to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (New South Wales). Morris, an anthropologist, provides the background to these and other events, and captures the tensions that characterised indigenous politics at the time, as well as the post-colonial ‘fantasies’ and ‘anxieties’ that infused the broader society around its bicentenary.
... (read more)Andy Lloyd James reviews '26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788–91' by Ross Gibson
Words matter, and there can be few more misleading ones in Australian history than ‘settlement’, as used to describe the period immediately following the arrival of the First Fleet. It connotes understanding and agreement. In Sydney Cove, by contrast, five distinct groups were present: Governor Phillip and his immediate entourage; naval vessels and their crews; a detachment of Royal Marines; a group of convicts; and the Indigenous people of the area whose home it had been for tens of thousands of years – all of them at some stage profoundly misunderstanding each other and often in major disagreement or conflict; all of them decidedly unsettled.
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