Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling

Now included in UQP's First Nations Classics series with an introduction by Fiona Foley, Finding Eliza is a vital Indigenous perspective on colonial storytelling.

Aboriginal lawyer, writer and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island off the Queensland coast in 1836. In this deeply personal book, Behrendt uses Eliza's tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people - and indigenous people of other countries - have been portrayed in their colonisers' stories.

Exploring works as diverse as Robinson Crusoe and Coonardoo, Behrendt looks at the stereotypes embedded in these accounts, including the assumption of cannibalism and the myth of the noble savage. Ultimately, Finding Eliza shows how these stories not only reflect the values of their storytellers but also reinforce those values - and how, in Australia, this has contributed to a complex racial divide.

About the Author

Larissa Behrendt is the author of three novels- Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story, which won the 2022 Voss Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and the ABA Booksellers' Choice Awards, and longlisted for numerous prizes including the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

She received the Human Rights Medal in 2021 from the Australian Human Rights Commission; and Order of Australia in 2020 for her work in Indigenous education, law and the arts; the 2011 NSW Australian of the Year award; and the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award. She has written, directed and produced several short and feature films, including After the Apology and Innocence Betrayed. In 2018 Larissa won the Australian Directors' Guild Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Feature and in 2020 the AACTA for Best Direction in Nonfiction Television. She is the host of ABC Radio's Speaking Out and is Distinguished Professor and Laureate Fellow at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.