Seeing the First Australians

This book explores some of the many ways in which the Aboriginal people have been seen by Europeans and their Australian descendants. From first contact to the present day, Aboriginal people have been observed, recorded, reflected upon, moralised over and theorised about by Europeans - explorers, settlers, missionaries, scientists, artists, photographers, administrators - according to a variety of often unacknowledged hopes, wishes, fears and beliefs. These ways of seeing often tell us as much about the Europeans as about the people they observed. They are part of a response within which lay the seeds of great and continuing tragedy. This book brings together for the first time, the work of researchers in the fields of prehistory, anthropology, linguistics, literature, art history and photography. These essays, and the many illustrations which accompany them, explore a theme still too little understood two centuries after white settlement...