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Book Review
| Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005. pp. xiv + 256. $39.95 paper.
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| Maria Nugent's Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet emerged from her doctoral thesis. In 2004, the finished book won the inaugural Allan Martin Award established in memory of the esteemed Australian historian. It is a fine read. |
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Nugent has produced an accessible and skilful weaving of local and national history, social and cultural anthropology, oral history and memory narrative. Among related layers we discover memorialising, urban geography, landscape and botany, white and black politics, colonial and national literature, art and cultural representations. Importantly, this book deals with two strongly imprinted human encounters that touch deeply, drawing from first contacts made at Botany Bay in 1788 to today's continuing encounters. |
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There is irony in this significant place. This shallow and unpromising Bay, rejected by Arthur Phillip, is home to Australia's largest international airport witnessing Australians depart to encounter the world, and as many strangers arriving to settle; Botany Bay remains a place where histories keep on meeting. |
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Botany Bay was inhabited well before Captain Cook's brief encounter in 1770, but the Indigenous peoples' place in Australia's national history was effaced swiftly to make room for a second 'new' colonial history. Nugent notes that 'the Botany Bay landscape was simultaneously a parchment for the story of the nation and a witness to what has been excised from the national story' (p. 66). She has corrected this imbalance. |
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Nugent provides a colonial theme to initially capture our historical imagination — Captain Cook, Botany Bay, 1770 — and to this touchstone she constantly returns. Readers relate in a memory-jogging sense accepting that the elemental phrase captures more. As she argues, original histories have been submerged under more privileged perceptions driven initially by the thrill of discovery and European territorial claims. |
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From thorough and imaginative research drawn from official and other more lateral sources, Nugent provides readers with objective and informed interpretations. This clearly assists in refocusing our views of Botany Bay. Nugent's skilful use of theoretical, metaphoric and historical markers guide readers and new seekers of reconciliation. |
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Transforming Botany Bay's history with cultural sensitivity, Nugent lays out each chapter with amusing narrative headings. In her re-telling, she has checked for any obvious signs indicating gaps in the bigger story, especially seen from an Aboriginal perspective. She has filled absences with prudent interpretation and tangible evidence. This historical palimpsest results in an intricate, grounded and very human-scale history of a locality that bears the significant weight of colonial and national history. The locale where British and other Europeans, notably the French, first encountered the Aboriginal inhabitants in 1788, takes on rich new meanings. |
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Botany Bay is a physical location but also serves as a trope and historical leitmotif. The place is, after all, ingrained in our collective cultural psyche. The methodology marks Nugent's history for success as she paced out a way for others to follow in Australian history making. To a significant extent she reclaims temporal and community landscapes. |
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On her journey she has revealed much about 'the shifting contours of Australian historical consciousness; about how the nation and its origins are imagined at different times, about the nature and quality of relations between Aborigines and various groups in the larger settler community' (p. 201). This is not history at an academic distance. |
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What impressed me most with Nugent's sanguine account is that we are not berated for lack of perception, but are provided with a way of seeing again, of literally reviewing. She suggests Botany Bay as a reconciliation landscape and we can agree with this proposition to contemplate fruitful possibilities (p. 194). |
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We are shown Botany Bay as a wilderness with unnamed Aboriginal inhabitants briefly in view, to later see Botany Bay as an isolation ward and cemetery, a shantytown, a residential suburb, tourist destination, an industrial wasteland and work camp, and as an historical and environmental combat zone. Nugent draws on inherited memory and oral accounts from non-Aboriginal residents, observers, modern descendants of the Aboriginal families and others whose links with the region remain sustained. |
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Segueing briefly to Lapérouse, I particularly liked Nugent's reference to Botany Bay as 'a little piece of France' and her treatment of the long-term implications of that short-lived French encampment. Too often this Gallic encounter with the local Aboriginal inhabitants is dealt with swiftly, as an aberrant episode with little lasting national meaning. The memorial to this brief French encounter now marks out the impromptu discovery as well as a lost opportunity for French navigators and potential competitors. Nugent's account provides an overlay of 'What If?' historical possibilities. |
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What Nugent's history emphasises strongly is that historians are accountable for considering and including the Aboriginal story wherever possible as an inseparable and intrinsic part of the national story. This important message is crucial to the whole Australian historical enterprise. |
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