Bennelong and Phillip: A Relationship Unravelled

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The first dual biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history the colonised and coloniser and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.

Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colonys first governor, and Bennelong the Eora leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.

Fullargars account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them 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.

Author Bio

Kate Fullagar is professor of history at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, in the Australian Catholic University, and co-editor of the journal History Australia. Her book The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction at the 2021 NSW Premiers Awards.