Kirjahaku

This work turns our assumption that the convicts who came to Australia were all white upside down. It is a great read - Cassandra Pybus is a wonderful storyteller. It picks up on an area of great and growing interest, as seen through the success of Inga Clendinnen's ""Dancing With Strangers"", Kate Grenville's ""The Secret River"", and Tom Keneally's ""Commonwealth of Thieves"". In this compelling new book, distinguished historian and writer, Cassandra Pybus, reveals that black convicts were among our first fleet settlers - a fact which profoundly complicates our understanding of race relations in early colonial Australia. Most of these black founders were originally slaves from America who had sought freedom with the British during the American Revolution only to find themselves abandoned and unemployed in England when the war was over. Pybus' stories include the notorious runaway ""Black Caesar"", who became our first bushranger, and the wonderfully subversive Billie Blue, who was the first ferryman on Sydney Harbour, after whom Blues Point is named.

*Winner of the 2021 National Biography Award and shortlisted for the 2020 Queensland Literary Awards*Cassandra Pybus's ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne.For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. Now Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini's extraordinary story in full.Hardly more than a child, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the 1820s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. She spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highlands and through barely penetrable forests, with George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary who was collecting the survivors to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy - the so-called extinction of the original people of Tasmania.Truganini's story is inspiring and haunting - a journey through the apocalypse.'For the first time a biographer who treats her with the insight and empathy she deserves. The result is a book of unquestionable national importance.' - PROFESSOR HENRY REYNOLDS, University of Tasmania