A HISTORY UNRAVELLED
Paperback now available here! First Published on 4 October 2023 by Simon & Schuster. All royalties from the book go to the Uluru Statement Education Campaign. Some discussions of it with me and various bods are here. A recent reading of the last few pages here (under ‘F’).
Shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History, the National Biography Prize, the Premier’s Award for Australian History, the Premier’s Award for NSW History, The Age Book of the Year, the ACT Literary NonFiction Award, the Ernest Scott Prize, and the Magarey Medal in Biography.
Flap Blurb:
In 1789 Captain Arthur Phillip, governor of the colony of New South Wales, kidnapped the Wangal man Bennelong as a potential negotiator for a treaty.
While the treaty never eventuated, their years of contact – including Phillip’s near-fatal spearing and their journey to England together – meant that the stories of these two men became permanently entwined. Phillip has been widely regarded as a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence, the father of the nation, whereas Bennelong has often been thought of as an outcast, even a traitor to his people.
The inaccuracy of these portraits prompted award-winning historian Kate Fullagar to write this extraordinary account of their lives in reverse. By upending the conventional chronology, she digs down through layers of misperception, moving beyond conventional Western ways of writing about the past.
Bennelong & Phillip foregrounds neglected dimensions of these lives, such as the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements. It shows that Phillip was less a moral founding father than the unquestioning servant of a rampant empire who did not regard his brief time in New South Wales as the highpoint of his career. It shows that Bennelong, far from being exiled on his return from England, went on to live as a respected leader whose chief concern remained the preservation of his people and culture.
Some Pre-Press:
‘Kate Fullagar has achieved something astonishing with this dual biography of the eighteenth-century Eora warrior, emissary Bennelong, and colonial governor Arthur Phillip. The complexities of their relationship stand as a leitmotif for Australian race relations…This is reconciled history at its very best.’ — Distinguished Professor Lynette Russell AM
‘Sadly, bias and inaccuracy in portraying Australia’s history have been reinforced and justified over two centuries of dispossession, dispersal and discrimination…Bennelong became the stereotype of the defeated ‘native’, a victim, scarred by dispossession and cultural loss, who could not adapt to European ‘civilisation’. In Bennelong & Phillip Kate Fullagar smashes the many myths of one of the most mythologised Aboriginal men of those early settlement times. She comprehensively investigates, tracks and details the intricate relationship between Bennelong and Phillip across two continents. Bennelong & Phillip is the foundation story of us – the story of Country – the story of our nation.’ — John Paul Janke, co-host of NITV’s The Point
‘History is usually written moving forward, from past to present. But Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong and Phillip is a rare feat of imagination; a narrative that is true to the way we discover history – through a backward glance. Fullagar’s determined, searching and courageous approach challenges our assumptions about the past and its relationship with the present. The backward pairing of Bennelong’s and Phillip’s lives expands the horizon of their histories. Unshackled from their conventional walk-on parts as cross-cultural negotiator and founding father, their lives become richer, their histories at once more anchored and more diffuse. At a moment of profound uncertainty for future relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Bennelong & Phillip is essential reading.’ — Mark McKenna, author of Return to Uluru
‘Bennelong and Phillip: two exiles, one in Sydney, one in London, struggling to make sense of utterly alien worlds. They meet, baffle, recoil, reconcile, drift apart. With insight and empathy, Kate Fullagar adds new depth and meaning to this old story of nation-building and imperial dispossession.’ — Bill Gammage AM, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth.
Some Reviews
“Fullagar transforms elusive detail into a compelling narrative. This is not only an important book but a timely one: she concludes that under Bennelong and Phillip, conciliation between First Nations and settlers was briefly attempted but ultimately unsuccessful. Understanding the historical context for this will help us, as a nation, to acknowledge its urgency and necessity.” Phillip Deery in The Age
“a brave, audacious, and exciting idea … ethically scrupulous … a book that carries us much further on the journey to a reconciled future – and a delicious read to boot.” Victoria Grieves Williams in The Australian (image below)
“Fullagar … presents the historical counter-narrative in her elegantly written double-barrelled biography.” Paul Daley, The Guardian.
“Bennelong & Phillip represents Fullagar’s mastery of an ethnohistorical approach that uses close and ‘thick description’ to analyse relationships between individual British and Indigenous men….There’s no doubt that Fullagar has set up a new direction for thinking about the ways we structure our histories.” Victoria Haskins, History Australia.
“…contributes to truth-telling by presenting a fuller and more accurate picture of colonisation than we might have heard before…a fantastic book and a challenging one,” Books + Publishing
“Freeing herself from [an] old paradigm, Fullagar also frees Bennelong and Phillip. The various life phases of each take on a new significance. More than that, invasion, occupation and settlement can be more clearly understood because nothing is preordained….no one can avoid having their ideas about invasion challenged to some extent by this remarkable book.” Alan Atkinson in Inside Story
“Bennelong and Phillip gives us a new, original lens onto this origin story…The book’s narrative reversal requires some skilful management to make sense. Fullagar…writes beautifully and clearly. That mastery of time and prose is essential, because this isn’t the sort of history book you can flick through on autopilot…Bennelong and Phillip is a disciplinary accomplishment.” Anna Clark in The Conversation
“…tells two life stories backwards, from death to birth, to free both Bennelong and Arthur Phillip from the roles their memories have been forced into over two centuries of empire and nation building in Australia. Such legacies often calcify our understanding of historical actors, a torpor Fullagar hopes to shake off with her original approach to life writing.” Katherine Parker, Journal of Historical Geography
“The result of Fullagar’s contextual reading is a nuanced and questioning view … a very readable book.” Emma Dortins, Australian Book Review
A “best book of the year” for three different ABR authors🙂
Kate Fullagar 