Unsettling Australian histories: letters to ancestry from a great-great-grandson / by David Denborough.

Adelaide : Dulwich Centre Foundation, 2020.

198652

Denborough, David.

Griffith, Samuel Walker, -- Sir, -- Judge, -- appointed 1893-1903 -- Judge,.

Aboriginal Australians -- Colonization -- Queensland.

Aboriginal Australians, treatment of -- History -- Queensland.

Australia -- Race relations -- History.

Forward / Victoria Grieve-Williams

Preface

A letter of introduction

Lest we forget

Unsettling histories

A song from past to present

If blood should stain the wattle

Living in the shadow of genocide

The South Seas

Police, prisons and dreams of freedom

Speaking of code

Statements of the heart

A final letter to ancestry

A letter to the future

Acknowledgments.

What do you do when you find your family tree has been re-planted in someone else’s yard? What do you do as a white Australian when you are invited by Aboriginal friends and colleagues to connect with and honour your ancestry? These questions become even more complicated when you know your family participated in colonial violence and dispossession. My great-great-grandfather was Samuel Griffith, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Australian Federation. He was a Premier of Queensland, the first Chief Justice of Australia and intimately involved in drafting the Australian Constitution. Other ancestors of mine participated in the Frontier Wars in North Queensland to claim, ‘settle’ and defend their occupation of Aboriginal lands. This book is a series of letters written to my ancestry. It"s been created through cross-cultural friendships and partnerships. It is an engagement with history that hopes to make possible more action in the present. - Back cover.

Donated to SCLQLD by the Dulwich Centre Foundation on 25/01/2021.

9780648060017

223 p. : illustration (some color), portraits, photographic prints; 24 cm