'The European maritime explorers who first visited the bays and beaches of Australia brought with them diverse assumptions about the inhabitants of the country, most of them based on sketchy or non-existent knowledge, contemporary theories like the idea of the noble savage, and an automatic belief in the superiority of European civilisation. Mutual misunderstanding was almost universal, whether it resulted in violence or apparently friendly transactions.
'Written for a general audience, The First Wave brings together a variety of contributions from thought-provoking writers, including both original research and creative work. Our contributors explore the dynamics of these early encounters, from Indigenous cosmological perspectives and European history of ideas, from representations in art and literature to the role of animals, food and fire in mediating first contact encounters, and Indigenous agency in exploration and shipwrecks.
'The First Wave includes poetry by Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, fiction by Miles Franklin award-winning Noongar author Kim Scott and Danielle Clode, and an account of the arrival of Christian missionaries in the Torres Strait Islands by Torres Strait political leader George Mye.' (Publication summary)
'Any attempt to capture the complexity of first ‘contact’ between Indigenous peoples and European visitors has to contend with sparse and often contradictory accounts, where the gap of understanding – both then and now – is far greater than any narrow bridges thrown across it. It is for this reason that the space between observation and imagination in the context of early cross-cultural encounters has always been fertile ground, explored both through academic texts (think of the contributions from Greg Dening's long career, particularly his Beach Crossings (2004), or edited conference volumes, such as Veth et al.'s Strangers on the Shore (2008)) and other works (the 2015–16 joint National Museum of Australia/British Museum exhibition Encounters springs to mind). (Introduction)
'First encounters between Indigenous Australians and European voyagers, sealers, and missionaries often unfolded on the beach, a contact zone where meaning and misunderstanding sparked from colliding worldviews. This sandy theatre also serves as one of the enduring metaphors of ethnographic history, a discipline that reads through the accounts of European explorers, diarists, and administrators to reconsider historical accounts of the gestures of Indigenous people from within their own cultural frameworks. Europeans blinded by racial preconceptions scribbled reports about the peoples they met, often misinterpreting actions as foolish, threatening, or pointless. Yet from the late twentieth century, historians such as Greg Dening (whose extensive theoretical work positioned the beach as the great physical and mental horizon of contact history) began combing through accounts of these tense meetings to reach for the other side of the story.' (Introduction)
'First encounters between Indigenous Australians and European voyagers, sealers, and missionaries often unfolded on the beach, a contact zone where meaning and misunderstanding sparked from colliding worldviews. This sandy theatre also serves as one of the enduring metaphors of ethnographic history, a discipline that reads through the accounts of European explorers, diarists, and administrators to reconsider historical accounts of the gestures of Indigenous people from within their own cultural frameworks. Europeans blinded by racial preconceptions scribbled reports about the peoples they met, often misinterpreting actions as foolish, threatening, or pointless. Yet from the late twentieth century, historians such as Greg Dening (whose extensive theoretical work positioned the beach as the great physical and mental horizon of contact history) began combing through accounts of these tense meetings to reach for the other side of the story.' (Introduction)
'Any attempt to capture the complexity of first ‘contact’ between Indigenous peoples and European visitors has to contend with sparse and often contradictory accounts, where the gap of understanding – both then and now – is far greater than any narrow bridges thrown across it. It is for this reason that the space between observation and imagination in the context of early cross-cultural encounters has always been fertile ground, explored both through academic texts (think of the contributions from Greg Dening's long career, particularly his Beach Crossings (2004), or edited conference volumes, such as Veth et al.'s Strangers on the Shore (2008)) and other works (the 2015–16 joint National Museum of Australia/British Museum exhibition Encounters springs to mind). (Introduction)
