Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a MassacreThe past is a problem for us. We know certain events happened, sometimes exactly when and yet our sometimes longing for certainty cannot be satisfied . . . We tell stories about where we come from and so who we are. We change these stories sometimes minutely, sometimes radically depending upon our audiences and our task. Bluff Rockis organised around the key question- how do we know the past? Using historical material (letters, memoirs), a tourist brochure, and local histories, it focuses on the ways that the massacre(s) of Aborigines at Bluff Rock, in New England during the 1840s has been recorded and remembered. It is the author's ability to lay herself on the line that makes this a courageous and even controversial text. Schlunke, who grew up in New England area, takes this one story from early colonial Australia and looks at the many ways it is organised as a memory of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. |
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Page 49
... idea that anything that happened in the area is somehow knowable and explainable , and the idea that nothing is ever quite extraordinary enough to become the truth , that is , ' official ' history . Local history is ' gossip ' . And I ...
... idea that anything that happened in the area is somehow knowable and explainable , and the idea that nothing is ever quite extraordinary enough to become the truth , that is , ' official ' history . Local history is ' gossip ' . And I ...
Page 61
... idea of the local . Keating begins the story of Bluff Rock with the idea that there were ' large mobs ' of ' wild and wickat blacks ' when Irby took over . This is certainly something that I never heard in the 1960s and 1970s . I heard ...
... idea of the local . Keating begins the story of Bluff Rock with the idea that there were ' large mobs ' of ' wild and wickat blacks ' when Irby took over . This is certainly something that I never heard in the 1960s and 1970s . I heard ...
Page 131
Autobiography of a Massacre Katrina Schlunke. explicit idea of town promotion at stake . Tenterfield must be a ' good ' town . It must be a benign site of possibility outside time . This idea of timeless quiet , of tourist sanctuary , is ...
Autobiography of a Massacre Katrina Schlunke. explicit idea of town promotion at stake . Tenterfield must be a ' good ' town . It must be a benign site of possibility outside time . This idea of timeless quiet , of tourist sanctuary , is ...
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 11 |
BLUFF ROCK | 19 |
IT HAPPENED ALONG THE HIGHWAY | 29 |
Copyright | |
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Aboriginal group Aboriginal workers actions Australia become Bluff Rock Massacre bodies Bolivia camp child colonial colour Connor convict cultural death Deepwater Station Demon Creek diary Edward and Leonard Edward Irby England Archives England Highway event family history father fire George Gipps Glen Innes granite happened head station Henry Parkes horse ibid idea imagine Indigenous Indigenous Australians invented Irby and Windeyer Irby's kangaroos Keating kill Aboriginal labour land Leonard Irby London look means Memoirs of Edward Mitchell Library murder Myall Creek Massacre narrative natives never Newbury night parrot non-Aboriginal organised particular past perhaps poem possible present produced punish punitive expedition rode settlement settler sheep shepherd shooting shot silence simply sort South Wales space squatters St Swithins story suggests Sydney Tenterfield things Thomas Tommy tourist leaflet town track tribe truth University Weaver William Brooks words writing