The First Wave: Exploring early coastal contact history in Australia Edited by Gillian Dooley and Danielle Clode

The European maritime explorers who first visited the bays and beaches of Australia brought with them diverse assumptions about the inhabitants of the country, most of them based on sketchy or non-existent knowledge, contemporary theories like the idea of the noble savage, and an automatic belief in the superiority of European civilisation. Mutual misunderstanding was almost universal, whether it resulted in violence or apparently friendly transactions.

Written for a general audience, The First Wave brings together a variety of contributions from thought-provoking writers, including both original research and creative work. Our contributors explore the dynamics of these early encounters, from Indigenous cosmological perspectives and European history of ideas, from representations in art and literature to the role of animals, food and fire in mediating first contact encounters, and Indigenous agency in exploration and shipwrecks.

The First Wave includes poetry by Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, fiction by Miles Franklin award-winning Noongar author Kim Scott and Danielle Clode, and an account of the arrival of Christian missionaries in the Torres Strait Islands by Torres Strait political leader George Mye.

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University, South Australia. She is the co-editor of Matthew Flinders’s Private Journal (2005) and has published several articles on Flinders. In 2014, she was invited to give the Royal Society Matthew Flinders Memorial Lecture at the Royal Society of Victoria in Melbourne, and in September 2017 she gave a lecture on Flinders and Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Gillian is also a journal editor and the author of books and articles on literary subjects from Jane Austen to J.M. Coetzee.

Danielle Clode is the author of nine books on various aspects of Australia’s environment and history. Killers in Eden (2002), later made into a TV documentary, documented the importance of Indigenous culture in the development of the unique hunting collaboration between the Twofold Bay killer whales and whalers. In 2007, Voyages to the South Seas, on French Pacific exploration, was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Award for Nonfiction. Danielle has held several writing fellowships and her books have been shortlisted for the CBCA awards and commended for the Whitley Award. She is currently a senior research fellow at Flinders University.

ISBN 9781743056158

$49.95

2 in stock