Investigating Colonisation Along A Road And At A Crossing Place

Bruce Pennay outlines the challenges he and Yalmambirra are trying to meet in developing a digital education resource.

Albury & District Historical Society is supporting Bruce Pennay and Yalmambirra in a project to develop a two-part kit, Investigating Colonisation along a Road and at a Crossing Place. The first part Contested Country examines frontier violence in this region, 1838-1845. The second part, Negotiating Coexistence, looks to the crossing and its surrounds as contact zones, where people geographically and historically separated, encountered each other, and where they were beginning to establish ongoing relations.

The resource is intended to  help teachers and students  investigate local dimensions of the proposed mandatory Australian  curriculum topic ‘Aboriginal Peoples’ Experiences of Colonisation’. It will be freely available to the public. The Society hopes that this storytelling might be accepted as a contribution towards reconciliation in 2024, ‘Now more than ever’.

Come learn about and comment on Albury & District Historical Society’s attempts to  share local contact and colonisation history with Aboriginal  and non-Aboriginal peoples. Find out about the search  for ways to prompt investigations of dispossession and resistance, resilience and survival in the Murray River crossing place region, 1838-1850. Learn how the route blazed by Hume & Hovell developed into a road central to the story of dispossession.

This project is partially funded through the AlburyCity Council Community & Cultural Grants program.

Image Credit: Courtesy Michael Cannon (ed.), Historical Records of Victoria, Volume 2A: The Aborigines of Port Phillip, 1835–1839, Melbourne, Victorian Government, 1982, p. 352.