From 1788, the lives of Bennelong and Phillip have been intertwined. But this is the first dual biography of these two pivotal figures in Australian history - the Eora leader and the Empire's governor, the colonised and coloniser - and a bold and innovative new portrait of our foundation story.
Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first colonising encounters: Phillip the first governor of the colony, and Bennelong, the Indigenous leader who travelled to England before returning to an ambiguous last two decades. They have become representatives of the conflict that flared and has never settled. The fact that there has never before been a dual biography - or indeed a full biography of Bennelong of any kind - is the first historical imbalance Kate Fullagar's daring and revelatory book puts right.
Incorporating the most recent research into both Bennelong's life and the breadth of the colonial project, Fullagar's story challenges many misconceptions - for example, that Bennelong became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. As well as telling the stories of these two remarkable men, she includes the important stories of their wives (Bennelong had several, including the now-famous Barangaroo; and Phillip's marital history is particularly revealing) and their communities - the Aboriginal context, which has been missing, and the global context of Empire, which sheds a penetrating light on Phillip's motives and methods.
To help this seeing-afresh - and to dig down through the layers of interpretation that have been filled in over the facts - Fullagar adopts a fresh method: she tells the story backwards, starting with the ends of their lives, and mirroring the direction of history's constant question, 'why did this happen?' And by looking at their whole lives, she shows that although in our eyes their encounter was the crescendo of their lives, the men themselves didn't see it that way: Phillip's gravestone makes no mention of his being the first governor of New South Wales; arguably, Bennelong thought of his most important battles as being against neighbouring tribes. We place them at the start of a new nation; they thought of themselves as being part of much older ones. In seeing their perspectives, we better understand both them and the uses their stories have been put to.
Challenging, inspiring, innovative, Bennelong and Phillip embraces all that's exciting in the modern approach to Australia's history.
