Bennelong and Phillip: A History Unravelled

Bennelong & Phillip is a groundbreaking book that challenges misconceptions about the relationship between Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history. It presents events in reverse, moving beyond Western ways of writing about the past, and offers a fresh perspective on the conflict between the colonised and the coloniser.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 04 October 2023
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia

The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history, offers a bold and innovative new portrait of both. Bennelong was the Yiyura leader, while Phillip was the colonys first governor. Their first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled. Fullagars account is the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and challenges many misconceptions, including that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the mens marriages, including Bennelongs best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillips unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire. To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelongs world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagars approach, his and Phillips histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.

Dimension: 234 x 153 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781761108174