Cirrus@Austlit

'My grandmother who lived with my family briefly during my adolescence turned me on to history. Despite having only a basic primary school education she had a keen sense of her place in history, regaling the family with stories of the ex-convict servant who worked on the family vineyard, the ‘bushrangers’ whose visit one night had terrorised her as a young child and her pride in being eligible to vote in the first election after Australian women were enfranchised in 1902. These stories fell on fertile ground, well tilled by the history teachers in my overcrowded high school in the baby boom suburb of Ringwood in Melbourne. In the years before industrial action by the Victorian Secondary Teachers’ Association compelled the Education Department to set minimum standards for teachers, history teachers stood out above a motley crowd. Ambitious men, taking a stint in a school still classified as rural to accelerate promotion, worked alongside female graduates bound to the area by family responsibilities. Their enthusiasm inspired students to extend their vision beyond the usual constraints of the outer suburbs.'  (Introduction)

'Kate Fullagar’s striking new book is guaranteed to jump right off the shelf at any Australian historian happily meandering their way around the bookshop. Appearing under Simon & Schuster’s very appealing literary non-fiction imprint Scribner Australia, it grapples with one of Australia’s foundational narratives, the relationship between the first British governor, Arthur Phillip, and the First Nations leader Bennelong. The names of these men have been long etched into the national consciousness. Yet, as Fullagar explains, despite the many works of history and art dealing with their lives and doings, nobody has attempted to bring their ‘entangled lives’ together in one historical study – until this book.' (Introduction)

'‘I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted not to go back.’ (15)

'But 50 years later, he did go back. Dean Ashenden begins with tourist signs and their silences, on his way to Warumungu Country where he lived as child. As Ashenden moves northwards, he takes us on a tour of great billboards erected in prominent places of small towns, paying homage to ‘explorers’ and ‘pioneers’. Where were the Aboriginal people?'  (Introduction)