AustLit

'In this important and challenging book, Liz Conor analyses in compelling fashion a range of settler impressions of Aboriginal women circulating in vernacular settler colonial print culture. Deeply aware that these disturbing images have been powerfully destructive historically and continue to cause hurt, Conor insists nonetheless that we must look at them more closely if we are to better understand the violence, misogyny and disavowal embedded within settler colonialisms past and present. Conor seeks to unveil a way of ‘knowing’ that may be skin deep but has been influential in shaping settler understandings of racial difference. Everyday images intersected in complex ways with the truth claims of expert or eyewitness accounts (for example, in the records of early explorers) and Conor follows their multivalences and circulations via the coincidence between industrialised print culture and colonialism itself. Her insightful interrogations illustrate how diverse sources often ‘strewn across time and place’ came to create ‘everyday cultural meaning’ (67).' (Introduction)