This work 'explores how we might read Friendly Mission in the twenty-first century. In doing so the essays in this volume are symptomatic - but not conclusively representative - of the multiple readers, readings and interpretations that this textual artifact can generate. Narratives of colonial encounter - explorers' journals, ethnographies, letters, paintings - survive to be fathomed by later generations and, particularly in the former settler colonies, such accounts of early contact between indigenous and invading cultures are crucial to understandings of nations and their politics.' (from the editors' Introduction p.13-14)
'Reading Robinson, while remaining cognisant of local resonances, extends Friendly Mission from parochial particularity and situates it within international contexts, both in terms of contemporary accounts of colonial/settler contact, conflict with indigenes and current scholarship analysing this material.' - back cover
