Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet by Maria Nugent

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Light foxing to top foredge. Marks to tail foredge. Interior and binding are still very good.

The first cultural history of one of the most significant Australian historical sites. From Captain Cook's first landfall to the present, it brings together the histories of white and black Australia.

Botany Bay is renowned as the site of Captain Cook's first landing on the east coast of New Holland in 1770, infamous as the place the British chose as a dumping ground for convicts, and celebrated as the birthplace of Australia.

In this remarkable history, Maria Nugent takes readers on a journey to discover what lies behind, beneath, and beyond these familiar associations. Drawing on stories, objects, images, memories and the landscape itself, she collects the threads of other pasts to weave a rich, compelling and often surprising account. Local meanings jostle with national mythologies, Aboriginal remembrance disturbs white forgetting, and the natural environment struggles for survival amid the smokestacks. In the process, Botany Bay becomes a site for meditating on questions of history, myth, memory and politics in Australia.

Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet explores the role both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history-making plays in creating and sustaining local and national communities. (publisher blurb)

Includes bibliography and index.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers, please note that this book may contain descriptions and/or images of people who have passed away.