Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colonys first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.

Fullagars account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the mens marriages, including Bennelongs best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillips unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.

To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelongs world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagars approach his and Phillips histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.

Author: Kate Fullagar
ISBN: 9781761108174
Type: Hardback
Dimensions: 153x234mm
Pages:320
Publisher:Scribner Australia
Published Date: 4 Oct 2023