Bennelong and Phillip

A History Unravelled

By: Kate Fullagar

Narrated by: Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood

Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history—the colonized and colonizer—and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.

Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.

Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.

To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the colonizer over the colonized. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Kate Fullagar (P)2023 Simon & Schuster Audio

Critic reviews

‘At a moment of profound uncertainty for future relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Bennelong and Phillip is essential reading.’ (Mark McKenna, author of Return to Uluru)

‘Kate Fullagar has achieved something astonishing … This is reconciled history at its very best.’ (Distinguished Professor Lynette Russell AM)

‘With insight and empathy, Kate Fullagar adds new depth and meaning to this old story of nation-building and imperial dispossession.’ (Bill Gammage AM, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth)