Dancing With Strangers : The True History of the Meeting of the British First Fleet and the Aboriginal Australians, 1788

In January of 1788 the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales and a thousand British men and women encountered the people who will be their new neighbours; the beach nomads of Australia. "These people mixed with ours," wrote a British observer soon after the landfall, "and all hands danced together." What followed would determine relations between the peoples for the next two hundred years. Drawing skilfully on first-hand accounts and historical records, Inga Clendinnen reconstructs the complex dance of curiosity, attraction and mistrust performed by the protagonists of either side. She brings this key chapter in British colonial history brilliantly alive. Then we discover why the dancing stopped . . . In January 1788 the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales and a thousand British men and women encountered the people who would be their new neighbors. Dancing with Strangers tells the story of what happened between the first British settlers of Australia and the people they found living there. Inga Clendinnen offers a fresh reading of the earliest written sources, the reports, letters, and journals of the first British settlers in Australia. It reconstructs the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader 'Bennelong' (Baneelon); and then traces the painful destruction of that hard-won friendship. A distinguished and award-winning historian of the Spanish encounters with Aztec and Maya indians of sixteenth-century America, Clendinnen's analysis of early cultural interactions in Australia touches broader themes of recent historical debates: the perception of the Other, the meanings of culture, and the nature of colonialism and imperialism. In January 1788 The First Fleet Arrived In New South Wales And A Thousand British Men And Women, Some Of Them Convicts And Some Of Them Free, Encountered The People Who Would Be Their New Neighbours—the Beach Nomads Of Australia. ‘these People Mixed With Ours,’ Wrote A British Observer Soon After Landfall, ‘and All Hands Danced Together.’ What Followed Would Shape Relations Between The Peoples For The Next Two Centuries. Tells the story of what happened between British settlers of NSW and the Australian inhabitants they found there. Using reports, journals and letters Clendinnen applies her eye to the key events in the tragic arc of dispossession and looks at the personalities involved: such men as Arthur Phillp, Bennelong and diarist Watkin Tench This is a telling of the story of what happened when a thousand British men and women, some of them convicts and some of them free, made a settlement on the east coast of Australia in the later years of the eighteenth century, and how they fared with the people they found there The First Fleet arrived in New South Wales in January 1788. Some of the men and women were free and some convicts. The Aboriginal and white people mixed for the first time, not without conflict. This has shaped our country, Australia, for the last two hundred years