Warning. Some may consider this an off topic rant!

The First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay on the 20th of January 1788. What followed was to change the lives of the lands First Peoples irrevocably.

This book is not new, as it was first published in 2003, but it is new to me and is a very thought provoking look at what happened between the first British settlers of Australia and the traditional owners. To say that I enjoyed the read would be wrong, because I found it confronting and disturbing, but I also found it uplifting as it points to a relationship that was originally positive and could still be today.

I first came across Inga Clendinnen writings when reading Mezo- American history in the 1980’s at Latrobe University, Melbourne.

“A Prize-winning archaeologist, anthropologist and historian of ancient Mexican cultures, Inga Clendinnen has spent most of her teaching career at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan (Cambridge, 1989) and Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1995) are two of her best-known scholarly works”. Goodreads.

She is a very engaging story teller which is not only demonstrated in her works, “Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir”, (Scribner, 2001) in which she discusses how illness challenges and subverts the self, and explores how writing can become part of the imperative to recover, but also in “Reading the Holocaust” which explores World War 2 genocide from both sides.

Dancing with Strangers follows this tradition of story telling, but story telling with a difference. As a skillful historian she not only extensively uses, but interprets and reads between the lines the journals, reports and letters of First Fleet arrivals.

She reconstructs the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader ‘Bennelong’ (Baneelon), that was ultimately destroyed by the “Empires” assertion of profound cultural differences and political agendas.

This appears as a common thread in British Colonialism, whether it be the Founding Fathers in the United States, or the First Fleet in Australia. I am not sure which is worse, one in which thanksgiving for the first harvest is celebrated, but ignores the massacres that followed soon after, or one that totally ignores and writes the First Nation inhabitants totally out of the narrative.

Clendinnen tells the story through the writings of five main players, Governor Arthur Phillip, Captain John Hunter of HMS Sirius, Watkin Tench, a captain-lieutenant of marines, John White, the surgeon; and judge-advocate David Collins. She not only brings their characters to life, but also their insights on events in a way that is accessible for the first time to 21st century Australians.

What I find amazing about this story is how quickly we forgot about the shared feasts, the singing, the hair combing and those dances on the shoreline, to create a second Terra Nullis as the violence, dispossession and disease became characteristics of our interactions with the lands First Nations peoples for the next two hundred and forty four years.

We should be ashamed.

We are not a country that celebrates difference and diversity, but are suspicious of anything that challenges our British heritage. The White Australia policy may be long gone but the attitudes are not.

Yesterday we had an example of how even in very small ways we profoundly effect people’s lives.

Maree was invited to have a cup of tea with a neighbour. The neighbour was proudly talking about her new house and was asked if she wanted to see some changes we had made to ours. She asked if we would mind if she put on a head scarf as it was her custom to cover her head when she went outside of her home. She was uncomfortable that we might be offended, and felt she needed to ask because of the ridicule and abuse from others she receives constantly over this custom of modesty. No, we do not celebrate difference well!

Prior to reading this book it is an indictment on myself that I was totally unaware of the initial interactions of the the First Fleet arrivals and First Nations people, but then Australia is not fair, is it.

A must read for all Australians who think our nation is built on mateship and a fair go, or still believe in the myth of an egalitarian Australian society, or that our national anthem “Advance Australia Fair” applies to all and not just the privileged few!