The Challenge and the Chance: The Colonisation and Settlement of North West Australia 1861-1914 by K Forrest

Book Description

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Above all Shirley Kay Forrest has striven to be fair, and to present the activities of both Australian Aborigines and European settlers in the North West with balance and understanding. This is an important book. (Geoffrey Bolton)

This book focuses on the black-white relationships and the changing attitudes and moralities of white Australians when they, too, became "indigenous".

In a poverty-stricken colony and a district too vast for the magistrate to police of control and on a sea and country out of reach of the law, the new breed of colonisers wrested a living from a harsh environment and the local Australian Indigenous people.

The end of transportation and the advertisement of cheap, rich country, brought new players into the field, and as pearl fishing increased, the lust for pearls opened up the lucrative and illicit slave trade.

How the British Government, the various governors, the legislature and the public dealt with this knowledge and the corruption and violence it entailed opens up a new chapter of Australian history (book flap)