Inga Clendinnen: Dancing With Strangers: Sydney 1788-1800

Reviewed by ALISON JONES

This is a most enjoyable sort of history. Clendinnen, the award-winning Australian historian of first contact in Spanish America, gets us up close to the men and women of the first few years of British settlement in Australia.

By peering over British shoulders at their letters home, and reading their journals, she discerns the small events and compounding errors which were to have such large and tragic consequences for the native peoples of Australia.

The official leaders of the new convict settlement in 1788 had plenty to say about the aboriginal inhabitants of the unwelcoming land, and their views are reshaped into an extremely readable narrative as Clendinnen grapples with the cultural assumptions of both the indigenous Australians and the new arrivals.

She provides an intimate and astonishing account, rich with affecting scenes: Australian and British men hold hands and dance on the beach as they attempt communication; bumbling British soldiers are ridiculed by the locals as they crash through the hot bush, or sink in swamps, dressed in their woollen uniforms; horrifying violence is meted out by local men against their women, and by British men against each other.

And while we can't but admire the complete lack of indigenous interest in co-operation with British terms of engagement, we feel the aching distance between the two groups even as they attempt to understand each other.

Because we know the outcome, the story has a deep poignancy. But Clendinnen does not just plod through the familiar sad story of oppression. Hers is a lyrical account that draws us into its passionate heart.

As the characters unwittingly hurt each other, we have to face the impossibility of humane colonisation, and the hopelessness of a situation when two profoundly different cultures meet, with one intent on taking land and resources in an invasion the other is unable to thwart.

Clendinnen appears not to have talked with aboriginal people as she tackled the complex task of understanding their desires, relying instead on published histories and close reading of the texts of the (often thoughtful and intelligent) colonisers.

This surprised me somewhat. Perhaps present politics preclude cross-cultural co-operation in redescribing Australia's past, and the chasm between Australia's settlers and indigenous people, so painfully clear at first sustained contact in 1788, remains today.

In her superbly written story, we see the die being cast.

Publisher: Text

Price: $49.95