Bluff Rock

"The past is a problem for us. We know certain events happened, sometimes exactly when and yet our longing for certainty cannot be satisfied … we tell stories about where we come from and who we are. We change these stories sometimes minutely, sometimes radically …

This is an original and courageous book. Schlunke, who grew up in the New England area, takes this one story — the massacre(s) of Aborigines at Bluff Rock, in New England during the 1840s — and looks at the many ways it is organised as a memory of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Schlunke breaks new ground as she probes the 'hidden histories' of Indigenous-settler encounters and addresses herself urgently to the problems of 'history' in Australia."