Dancing with Strangers

A fascinating exploration of the thoughts and actions of the British who first colonized Australia, the thoughts and actions of people they found already living there, and the vast cultural divide between them. A wise and beautifully written book.

The only records of the encounter between the first group of British colonists and the Indigenous Australians are those written by British officers and professionals who accompanied the first colonists to settle at Sidney. With skills drawn from history and anthropology, Clendinnen explores the assumptions and cultural patterns which motivated both the British writers and the Australians, as she calls them. She does not question the accuracy of the British accounts of what happened; she does show more question the British assumptions that the Australian Indigenous people were irrational and inferior. She goes on to reconstruct unwritten cultural assumptions of both groups, assumptions that lay in the way of any long-term reconciliation between them. Such an approach is problematic, of course, as Clendinnen would agree, but she sees it as alternative to those who would understand the encounter only through the judgmental eyes of British. Her speculations push us to consider the first Australians as human beings, not the passive, pasteboard figures which they too often appear.

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The story of the contact between indigenous Australians and the British in what became Sydney between 1788 and 1795. Clendinnen shows that the first Governor, Arthur Phillip and Bennelong wanted much the same thing - to try and get the other to adopt their ways. The diseases brought by the British destroyed many of the Australians in the first few years throwing their society into chaos. Clendinnen goes to great lengths to explain Phillip's attempts, and eventual failure, to understand the Australians' culture, and shows where the lack of British imagination and the huge gulf in linguistic understanding eventually led to tragedy.

What happened when British settlers landed in the country of a people they knew nothing about? What did those people think? What did they do? The story of Sydney's very first few years. Honest, probing, challenging. What history should be.

read this while on a houseboat on the Hawkesbury RIver - home of the first Australians invaded by pale skinned people with strange ways ; waering clothes, building houses, growing wheat and keeping edible animals.

A thoughtful, imaginitive study of the earliest records.