Living with the Locals, Early Europeans' experience of Indigenous Life

by John Maynard, Victoria Haskins

Living with the Locals comprises the stories of 13 white men, boys and women who were taken in by the Indigenous people of the Torres Strait islands and of eastern Australia and who lived in their communities between the 1790s and the 1870s, from a few months to over 30 years. The white people had been shipwrecked or had escaped the confines of penal servitude and survived only through the Indigenous people’s generosity. Many of them were given Indigenous names—Bunboé, Murrangurk, Duramboi, Waki, Giom, Anco. They assimilated to varying degrees into an Indigenous way of life—several marrying and learning the language—and, for the most part, both parties mourned the white people’s return to European life.

The stories in Living with the Locals provide a glimpse into Indigenous life at the point of early contact between Indigenous people and British colonists. It was a time when negative attitudes towards Indigenous people gave rise to misinterpretation of events and sensationalised versions of the stories. However, many of the white survivors spoke up against the appalling treatment of the Indigenous people, and advocated for conciliation and land rights. They also were unwilling to reveal Indigenous beliefs and customs to unsympathetic colonists

Genres: History, Australia, Nonfiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Lisa]

Living with the Locals, Early Europeans’ Experience of Indigenous Life, by John Maynard and Victoria Haskins, is fascinating reading, and it is, as I predicted, great companion reading to Larissa Behrendt’s Finding Eliza, Power and Colonial Storytelling (see my review). It’s a combination of tales of shipwreck and escape, a glimpse into indigenous life and culture at First Contact, and an analysis of the ways in which these survival stories were told and misappropriated afterwards.

With full colour illustrations sourced from the collection at the National Library of Australia, the book includes a map of our eastern seaboard, identifying the places where shipwreck survivors and convict escapees were taken in and cared for by the local indigenous people. There were just two that I already knew of: William Buckley, buckleys-hopewhose story of living with the indigenous people of Port Phillip Bay I had read many years ago in a novelised narrative called Buckley’s Hope, the story of Australia’s Wild White Man (Scribe, 1981) by Craig Robertson; and the notorious Eliza Fraser whose sensationalised story on life on Fraser Island I had recently re-read in Behrendt’s book. But Eliza was not the only woman to live with indigenous people after shipwreck: there was also Barbara Thompson who

spent four to five years living on Muralug (Prince of Wales Island) with the Kaurareg islanders and the Aboriginal people of Queensland’s far north. She was known as ‘Gieowma’ or ‘Giom’ for short, a senior Islander man’s favoured daughter, returned from the dead. (p.149)

Authors Maynard and Haskins, an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous historian respectively, suggest on the basis of the evidence gathered from contemporary accounts and indigenous oral history that the startling presence of white people encroaching on Indigenous land was attributed by Aborigines to ancestral returns from the dead. By and large, despite the sensationalised post-rescue accounts and the inevitable misunderstandings, these white people were treated well, and might now be regarded as refugees rather than captives.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/11/11/l...

[Clare Snow]

"We hope that we have delivered a glimpse of what living together with mutual respect might still be like, if we could only imagine it."

[Sam]

Super interesting.

[Janine]

William Buckley was not the only white person to be accepted into an indigenous group, as John Maynard and Victoria Haskins show in this book. Nor is this the only book to tell their stories- as with the many versions of the Eliza Fraser story. Where this book differs from other accounts is in its careful reading against the narratives (generated both at the time and later) in order to reconstruct indigenous life and practice at this time of political and economic transition for aboriginal people. The information that these Europeans brought back into white society when they were ‘discovered’ or ‘saved’ can, read sensitively, provide a different perspective on pre-invasion or invasion-era indigenous life to counter the settler or missionary narratives which then (and to a large extent, now) largely framed knowledge of indigenous practices.

For my full review see:
https://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2...

[Ss]

An impassionate account of the experiences of men and women. The white man's claims of bringing civilisation to the aboriginal groups laid bare. It also describes how developed was the worlds oldest continuously existing civilisation.
White man's 'land grab' in the guise of development and culture. A similar technique was used by an English east India company in India

[Mikhaila Chaplin]

An incredible read and very eye opening. The audience are able to catch a glimpse of the everyday lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as well as their customs and culture.

[Rhonda]

A fascinating well-researched read, adding to our understanding of Aboriginal life from accounts at the time. There was much promised, but I wished the book had more direct quotes from the original sources rather than interpretation. It was well-illustrated, but the source and date of the images were not shown with the images so it was difficult to tell how closely they related to the section they were in.