Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission brings together essays from leading Australian and international historians, in a timely analysis of the monumental Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829−1834, edited by NJB Plomley and republished in 2008. Until now, Friendly Mission has rarely been considered in a context beyond the immediacy of Van Diemen’s Land. Yet George Augustus Robinson’s diverse writings constitute a body of work that typically has one set of meanings for local readers, and another for those outside its sphere of production. Robinson’s texts are exemplary of the ways in which colonial texts circulated around what Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, has called ‘imperial networks.’

Reading Robinson, while remaining cognisant of local resonances, extends Friendly Mission from parochial particularity and situates it within international contexts, both in terms of contemporary accounts of colonial / settler contact, conflict with indigenes and current scholarship analysing this material.

238 pages, section sewn, soft cover with French folds

Recommended retail price: $34.95

ISBN 978 0 9775572 5 7

Table of Contents:
click here

Availability:

Within Australia:

Leading independent bookstores

Or

Directly from Blackgum Distribution Services:
ahopwood@bigpond.net.au
0419 970 400 (Andrew Hopwood)
Phone (61 3) 6234 9950
Fax: (61 3) 6234 9694
PO Box 622, North Hobart, Tasmania, Australia 7002
(add postage)

Overseas:

Directly from Blackgum Distribution Services
(add postage)

Reading Robinson: Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Reading Friendly Mission in the Twenty-first Century: an Introduction
          Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls          
2. George Augustus Robinson and Imperial Networks            
           Alan Lester
3. King Billy’s Bones: Colonial Knowledge Production in 19th-century Tasmania
          Patrick Brantlinger
4. A People Who Have No History?                                                   
          Ian Anderson
5. Between Van-Diemen’s Land and the Cape Colony                                    
          Elizabeth Elbourne
6. Community Voice: Wendy Aitken    
7. A Self-made Man                                                                           
          Cassandra Pybus
8. Reliable Mr Robinson and the Controversial Dr Jones
          Rebe Taylor
9. N J B Plomley’s Contribution to North-West Tasmanian Regional History
           Ian McFarlane
10. Community Voice: Rodney Dillon    
11. Historians, Friendly Mission, and the Contest For Robinson and Truganini
            Lyndall Ryan
12. George Augustus Robinson in Van Diemen’s Land: Race, Status, and Religion
            Henry Reynolds
13. Recording the Human face of War: Robinson and Frontier Conflict 
            John Connor
14. Community Voice: Sharon Dennis      
15. Against Heritage: an Afterword      
            Nicholas Thomas

Contributors