The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, The Settlers and the Protectors

(Paperback)

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In this superbly researched book Bain Attwood eschews the generalisations of national and colonial history to provide a finely grained local history of the Djadja Wurrung people of Central Victoria. Insisting on the importance of grappling with a history that involved a relationship between the people of this Aboriginal nation, the British settlers who invaded their country, and men appointed by the imperial and the colonial governments to protect the Aboriginal people, as well as a relationship between the Djadja Wurrung and their indigenous neighbours, Attwood not only tells the shocking story of the destruction, decimation, and dispossession of the Djadja Wurrung, he draws on an unusually rich historical record, and forgoes any reliance on historical concepts such as the frontier and resistance, to recover a good deal of the modus vivendi that the Djadja Wurrung reached with sympathetic protectors, pastoralists, and gold diggers, showing how they both adopted and adapted to these intruders and were thereby able to remain in their own country, at least for a time.

Drawing past and present together, Attwood closes this book with the remarkable story of the revival of the Djadja Wurrung in recent times as they have sought to become their own historians.

Reviewed in Australian Book Review here.

Reviews

Lucid, scrupulous scholarship at its best. Attwood sets high standards for historical truth-telling of a sort immediately relevant today.

-- Alan Atkinson

Avoiding big-picture generalisations, Bain Attwood has written a succinct and excellent close-grained study of the Djadja Wurrung people and their interactions with settlers and the Aboriginal Protectorate.

-- Richard Broome

This is a deep local history that pays attention to the forces of time and place to explore how colonial relations evolved as they did in this region, and how Aboriginal people responded to the successive colonial processes of dispossession, institutionalisation, and assimilation.

-- Amanda Nettlebeck

Once you have this broad picture of, first, the Aboriginal nations territory, then the overlay of the settlers claims, you begin to see the land differently.

-- Rosemary Sorensen

Concise, focused on places and people and alert to the historiography exemplary in every way.

-- Tim Rowse

It is in his attentiveness to the finer textures of frontier relations that Attwoods book really shines.

-- Russell McGregor

Author Bio

Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University and has held fellowships at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. In 2010 his bookPossession: Batmans Treaty and the Matter of Historywon the Ernest Scott Prize for the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or colonial history. He has written manybooks, including the acclaimed biographyWilliam Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story,about the inspirational Aboriginal leader William Cooper, and co-editedTelling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New ZealandandProtection and Empire: A Global History.