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Indlæser... From the edge : Australia's lost historiesaf Mark McKenna
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March 1797. Ninety Mile Beach, Victoria. Five British sailors and twelve Bengali seamen swim ashore after their longboat is ripped apart in a storm. The British penal colony at Port Jackson is 700 kilometres to the north, their fellow-survivors from the wreck of the Sydney Cove stranded far to the south on a tiny island in Bass Strait. To rescue them and save their own lives, they have no alternative. They set out to walk to Sydney. What follows is one of Australia's greatest survival stories and cross-cultural encounters. In From the Edge, award-winning historian Mark McKenna uncovers the places and histories that Australians so often fail to see. Like the largely forgotten story of the sailors' walk in 1797, these remarkable histories-the founding of a 'new Singapore' in West Arnhem Land in the 1840s, the site of Australia's largest industrial development project in the Pilbara and its extraordinary Indigenous rock art, and James Cook's meeting with Aboriginal people at Cooktown in 1770-lie on the edge of the continent and the edge of national consciousness.Retracing their steps, McKenna explores the central drama of Australian history- the encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians-each altered irrevocably by the other-and offers a new understanding of the country and its people. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)994.02History and Geography Oceania and elsewhere AustraliaLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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While I was engrossed (and sometime distressed) by these stories, I found that McKenna's commentary was occasionally and unexpectedly less insightful and more platitudinous; closer to pandering to some form of self-flagellating national disgrace that needs to be examined more carefully if anything is to change. That nothing much has changed when it comes to the devastatingly destructive power of successively incompetent Government attempts to make amends has been clearly articulated by Noel Pearson (mentioned in the last story). For anyone interested in why the settlers behaved so badly, I would point you to Wiley's When the Sky Fell Down. Wiley examines contemporary reports of Aboriginal contact in early Sydney that resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Aboriginal groups and culture. He traces the idea that what you believe influences what you see. At the time, many believed that the Aborigines were not human and were some lower form of barbarous savage. The Aborigines, in turn, saw how the invaders engaged in flogging and hanging and saw these new arrivals as cruel savages.
These ideas, though not mentioned, are exemplified in the contacts described by McKenna.
A few years ago I walked in bare feet about 200 km (six days) along the south western coast of Victoria. I camped in the dunes and carried little. So I had some small insight into the 700 km walk to Sydney up the east coast. Fascinating as this walk was, there was very little detail perhaps due to Clarke's lost journal. But McKenna does raise some intriguing questions. Whatever happened to the Bengalis? Whatever happened to the escaped convicts who set off on foot back to Sydney from Wilson's Promontory? The great unwritten history of white settlement in Australia revolves around the escapees and the forgotten people who inhabited the inland of Australia long before the 'explorers' opened it up.
Speaking of explorers, the arrival of failed explorer Ludwig Leichardt in the failed Singapore aka Port Essington would almost be funny were it not such a sad place. The Captain John McArthur who dutifully saw though the attempted establishment of Port Essington was not the same John Macarthur whose wife established the wool industry in his absence.
I travelled through the Pilbara in the 1970s a little before the industrialisation of the Burrup Peninsular. What is it about Australian Governments that they venerate 3,000 year old Egyptian pyramids and Greek ruins but can't grasp the value of 40,000-60,000 year old artworks and so allow them to be bulldozed with impunity and sanction the treatment of its living custodians with derision and contempt? ( )