This month, I’m taking on the ‘100km in March Challenge’ to support babies, children and adults living with cerebral palsy. 👶 🧒 👩
My challenge started on the first of March, and I would really appreciate your support. Every donation, no matter how big or small, will fund life-changing research into the prevention, treatment and cure for cerebral palsy.
Please donate to my page below and help show people living with cerebral palsy a future where the impossible is possible. 💚
I have walked 381 kilometers so far and with two days left I am hoping to walk 400 kilometres. So far, I have raised $A505, and would like to raise more. If you can sponsor me (donations $2 and over are tax deductible in Australia) I would really appreciate it.
‘Sometime in the summer of 1793-4, a small group of people—men, women and children—appeared on Dyarubbin, the river.’
Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, is where two worlds, with very different histories and views of land use and occupancy, collided. British felons, transported to Australia to serve their sentences, were here to settle. The Aboriginal people, who had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, were tied to the land spiritually and culturally.
In this book, Ms Karskens ‘explores worlds that were lost to history and public understandings.’
While Dyarubbin became a successful farming frontier for European settlers, it had a significant impact on the Aboriginal peoples who lived there. A steady, slow process of violence, of alienation and theft of Aboriginal children, of annexation of the river lands followed. And yet, as Ms Karskens writes, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people remained and still live on the river today.
‘The earliest British explorers and arrivals assumed that Aboriginal people were one society, speaking the same language, across the entire continent.’
While I found this book interesting, especially the explanation of how the small farms using common land were used in the colony just as they were being abolished in England, this reflects my European history, not that of the Aboriginal people. I wanted more. Can these histories be integrated so neatly? I am not (yet) convinced.
However, I confess to knowing very little of the history of the Dyarubbin (Hawkesbury), and I learned quite a lot about colonial settlement and history. Now I am wondering about the Aboriginal history and how (and by whom) this account can be presented.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Book 10 in my 2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. I’ve entered as a ‘Nonfiction Grazer’ and this book should be included under the heading of ‘History’.
Tasmanian Bibliophile @Large 