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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 51
Page 15
... writing about ' The Bluff Rock Massacre ' , I am both writing a cultural history , and attempting a model of what writing a history might look like if it were constantly concerned with how the writer was able to write , and how that ...
... writing about ' The Bluff Rock Massacre ' , I am both writing a cultural history , and attempting a model of what writing a history might look like if it were constantly concerned with how the writer was able to write , and how that ...
Page 181
... Writing in this official report form removes the acts described from their immediate context and allows them to be reconfigured in other kinds of spaces . The writing can be classified as a ' squatter's report ' , re - recorded as a ...
... Writing in this official report form removes the acts described from their immediate context and allows them to be reconfigured in other kinds of spaces . The writing can be classified as a ' squatter's report ' , re - recorded as a ...
Page 243
... writing to you . You , my reader , were not an imagined presence at the time . Then I really was ' just ' writing down , just tracking , just disciplining myself to record . Now I am chopping up , sautéing , broiling those records to ...
... writing to you . You , my reader , were not an imagined presence at the time . Then I really was ' just ' writing down , just tracking , just disciplining myself to record . Now I am chopping up , sautéing , broiling those records to ...
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 11 |
BLUFF ROCK | 19 |
IT HAPPENED ALONG THE HIGHWAY | 29 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
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