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Public Memory
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

Reconstructing Indigenous Responses to European Incursions in the north of Greater Brisbane, 1839 to 1859  By Dr Libby Connors

This research uses European legal records as the starting point for an investigation of frontier conflict in the founding years of the colony of Queensland.  The project draws on current anthropological work, archival sources and European memoirs which were originally drawn from Indigenous oral history to revise events defined in the 1850s as criminal activity.  As the historian, Inga Clendinnen recently wrote, the deficiencies of the colonizers’ documents leave a sense of ‘join-the-dots narratives plotted in terms of British expectations both of themselves and the “natives”.  In an attempt to overcome this methodological imbalance, it combines traditional historical investigation with an interdisciplinary approach to get beyond the nineteenth century European label of ‘savagery’ to a better cross-cultural understanding of events and actions on both sides of the frontier at the time of earliest contact.