The First Wave: Exploring Early Coastal Contact History in Australia

by Gillian Dooley (Editor), Danielle Clode (Editor)

The European maritime explorers who first visited the bays and beaches of Australia brought with them diverse assumptions about the inhabitants of the country, most of them based on sketchy or non-existent knowledge, contemporary theories like the idea of the noble savage, and an automatic belief in the superiority of European civilisation. Mutual misunderstanding was almost universal, whether it resulted in violence or apparently friendly transactions. Written for a general audience, "The First Wave" brings together a variety of contributions from thought-provoking writers, including both original research and creative work. Our contributors explore the dynamics of these early encounters, from Indigenous cosmological perspectives and European history of ideas, from representations in art and literature to the role of animals, food and fire in mediating first contact encounters, and Indigenous agency in exploration and shipwrecks.
 

Genres: History, Australia, Nonfiction

462 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2019

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really know anything about the period of first contact between Australia's original inhabitants and the Europeans who began to arrive in significant numbers during the late 18th and early 19th century. But I've now looked at a few books, and I can see why it's a difficult thing to write about. You can call it history if you like - well, I suppose everything that happens in the past is history, so that label can't be entirely wrong - but it's uncomfortably close to reconstructing a crime. There was large-scale murder, theft and rape. People lied about what happened, the way they tend to do when they they've committed crimes. It's difficult to know what happened, because the witnesses are often not forthcoming. They've been intimidated, or silenced, or they'd simply prefer not to talk about it. The victims, the various First Nations of the Australian continent, had only oral culture, which was systematically dismantled by the invaders. Their languages were suppressed and their social structures destroyed. Their descendents generally occupy the lowest rungs in modern Australian society.

This collection tries to address the issues by using a variety of methods, some non-standard, to present the sparse and unsatisfactory data. Some people have contributed poems or fictional reconstructions of early contact episodes. There are a few chapters which give conventional "historical" accounts. I read descriptions of artistic attempts in other media: song, drama, visual arts. The contributors pay attention to parts of the story that have not typically been placed in the foreground, the early sealers and whalers, the contacts between North Coast Australians and people from what are now the Indonesian islands.

It's a mixed bag, and I didn't think all of it worked; some pieces I liked, some I found frankly boring, some I couldn't decide. Probably every reader will have their own take on it. There were a couple of fictional reconstructions of early contact between Europeans and Australians which to me came across as powerful and affecting: one from the European side, one from the Australian side. I liked the slow, dreamlike descriptions of the music ceremonies deriving from the old contacts with the Muslim traders from the islands. Michael Cook's Broken Dreams sequence is erotic and disturbing.



(He's half native Australian, he's allowed to do this). And the final piece is extremely memorable, a factual attempt to piece together the story of one young Adelaide Plains girl who was kidnapped by sealers, raped, brutalised, made pregnant multiple times, occasionally treated with kindness, and whose main gift to posterity is a handwritten list of Kaurna words that has survived up to the present day and become part of the Kaurna language revival program. Her first four entries are the shortest and most effective poem I've seen this year. In English:

tired
to forget
lost
baby

Here you are, read it yourself.

[Clare Snow]

This is very good, but academic, so I've read it slowly. I have to return it to the library, but I'll get back to it.

Postponed p.78

[Danielle Clode]

It's cheating a bit, to include this one in my read books list, given that I'm one of the editors and a contributor. But 90% of the book is written by other people and I did have to read it all - quite thoroughly and several times! I love the way the different contributions tackle looking at Australia's first contact history from so many different angles - creative, poetic, artistic, photographic, musical and scholarly. Hopefully everyone will find a story or approach here that will appeal or suggest new ways of thinking about history and how it is recorded.