Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 [Review] Truganini : Journey Through the Apocalypse
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'Cassandra Pybus’ biography is a beautifully written attempt to rescue Truganini from the enormous condescension of colonial posterity. Truganini’s life was defined by the tragedy that engulfed her people, but Pybus attempts to restore her agency, rethink the choices that she made and glimpse the world as she might have seen it. For Pybus this exercise is a ‘moral necessity’ because of her own position as a direct beneficiary of the displacement and destruction of Truganini and her community. As she writes, hauntingly, ‘these are people whose lives were extinguished to make way for mine’ (xvii).' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies vol. 53 no. 4 2022 25494069 2022 periodical issue

    'At the end of the last century, Ann Curthoys outlined the history of ‘two distinct yet connected public and intellectual debates concerning the significance of descent, belonging and culture’ in Australia. The first revolved ‘around the cleavage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’, and especially the issue of how to grapple with the lingering effects of past colonialisms. The second centred on immigration and the challenge migrants – particularly non-Anglo migrants – have presented to Australian society at large. Curthoys argued that in public commentary and within numerous scholarly fields, including history, these debates were kept largely separate until the 1988 Bicentenary and its celebration of multicultural Australia, which included Indigenous people amongst the country’s broader diversity. Pauline Hanson’s ascendancy to Federal Parliament in 1996 pushed these debates into ‘uneasy conversation’ with each other as her public rhetoric frequently attacked both Indigenous people and migrants from Asia as groups who, in her view, were unable to assimilate. Curthoys argued that the two debates ‘can neither be conceptualised together nor maintained as fully distinct’, but rather must be situated within an understanding of Australia as a ‘society which is colonising and decolonising at the same time’. ‘All non-Indigenous people, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants alike’, wrote Curthoys, ‘are beneficiaries of a colonial history. We share the situation of living on someone else’s land’. (Editorial introduction)

    2022
    pg. 649-650
Last amended 1 Dec 2022 11:38:07
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