The Menzies Australia Institute at King’s College London hosted Professor Kate Fullagar to eliver this year's Menzies Lecture on the history of Bennelong and Phillip.
Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their respective people in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony's first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.
Kate Fullagar’s new book, Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023), is 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 men's marriages, including Bennelong's best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip's unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.
To present this history afresh, Fullagar narrated these events in reverse order. In this talk she will discuss both her method and her research, asking questions of both conventional ways of writing history and of the role of the past in debates about nations and Indigenous possibility.
Learn more about the Menzies Australia Institute: www.kcl.ac.uk/menzies
3 июн 2024
