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 15
... possible at any one moment . And when we look carefully at the stories from the past , some of which are called ... possible , while acknowledging that all that was possible is never imagined . In writing about ' The Bluff Rock Massacre ...
... possible at any one moment . And when we look carefully at the stories from the past , some of which are called ... possible , while acknowledging that all that was possible is never imagined . In writing about ' The Bluff Rock Massacre ...
Page 114
... possible , Australia was settled . But this silence is no longer a shared virtue it has become an oppressive secret . By the time Heffernan says his piece in the 1940s it had become impossible to assume that everyone was against ...
... possible , Australia was settled . But this silence is no longer a shared virtue it has become an oppressive secret . By the time Heffernan says his piece in the 1940s it had become impossible to assume that everyone was against ...
Page 186
... possible imitation of official campaigns , were riding and shooting indiscriminately across country , 110 Although in legal terms ' there could be no corporal or capital punishment without trial except in self defence or in the heat of ...
... possible imitation of official campaigns , were riding and shooting indiscriminately across country , 110 Although in legal terms ' there could be no corporal or capital punishment without trial except in self defence or in the heat of ...
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