Aliens & Savages

Aliens & Savages is a hands-on historical record of the racism that underpins Australia's growth as a nation. First published twenty-five years ago, this new and revised edition asks: what has changed?

As we approach the referendum on an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, Aliens & Savages is still the only publication of its kind - a survey of racism and xenophobia in Australian popular writings before the advent of social media. It is a collection of fiction and non-fiction, of personal narratives and official reports, of diaries and media misinformation. In it, you can hear the unguarded voices of the colonists, the squatters, the politicians; you can see the close relationship between the popular press and the prejudices of its readers. 

"In this unashamedly impassioned analysis of 'our collective cultural amnesia', Janeen Webb and Andrew Enstice have excavated a murky and largely ignored body of racist popular fiction, which has been conveniently forgotten or dismissed as unimportant because it is 'not serious literature'...Treating these buried stories as a kind of collective unconscious...the authors are able to explore the lineage of contemporary alarmist rhetoric."

            The Age