Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled

Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony's first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. Fullagar's new book gives an account of both men’s lives, and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that Bennelong became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised.

Bio:

Kate Fullagar FAHA is professor of history at the Australian Catholic University. She is also co-editor of the Australian Historical Association’s journal, History Australia. Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Kate specializes in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many Indigenous societies it encountered. She is the award--winning author of The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven, 2020) and The Savage Visit (Berkeley, 2012); the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle, 2012); and co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore, 2018).