Surveying the Wild Abyss

A$50 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

A unique record of the Hawkesbury's Frontier War and a powerful contemplation on memory and atonement. In this groundbreaking history of colonisation and frontier conflict in the Hawkesbury region, historian Barry Corr navigates the gaps and silences in the primary records to reveal settler amnesia, the cataclysmic nature of colonisation and the way history is remembered, or not remembered. Driven by primary source analysis of colonial records, the book is deeply informed by Corr's perspectives and community connections as an Aboriginal person who has lived most of his life in the Blue Mountains and north-western Sydney. Surveying the Wild Abyss reinvents the way Australian history is written and asks non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians to reflect on their history and consider what the future might look like. 'Barry Corr uses the master's tools with extraordinary precision to tear down the mansions of the settler mythscape of fear, denial and concealment to assert the primacy of the first history of place, its continuity and continued insistence on truth. Beyond the most repressive celebrations of settlement Corr reconstructs an Aboriginal history that cannot be denied or silenced.' Jeanine Leane, Wiradjuri poet, teacher, author and essayist from the Murrumbidgee river 'From personal story to history to critical philosophy, Barry Corr takes the Hawkesbury Frontier War to "cosmic" dimensions. More than historical facts, it is about a whole multifarious world surviving an

• Binding: Hardcover

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