The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten Narratives edited by Ian Clark and Fred Cahir

JUDGES' COMMENTS

The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills draws on the historical records left by members of the Victorian Exploring Expedition of 1860-61 — Burke and Wills  — and succeeding relief parties, as well as anthropological, linguistic, visual and oral evidence, especially Aboriginal accounts of the explorers. The essays in this book provide a set of new, original and important perspectives relating not only to the Burke and Wills expedition, but more generally to the nineteenth century interactions between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples.

What makes these essays so collectively valuable is their complex portrayal of the relations between the European interlopers and the Indigenous peoples of Australia, which they demonstrate were characterised by violence, curiosity, shared needs and sometimes even compassion. A great achievement of this book is to reveal that the story of Burke and Wills is immensely complicated, and does not fit easily into a straightforward foundation narrative of European exploration and occupation.