AustLit

'As much scholarship has shown over the past decades, settler attitudes to Indigenous peoples thrived on difference and righteousness — the latter not in a religious sense (necessarily) but in an absolute conviction, one sunk deep into the settler heart, of the moral and material justness of their usurpation of Indigenous country. This conviction sanctioned settler violence and outlawed Indigenous resistance. Difference not only denied the humanity in the Indigenous face; it made the people objects of curiosity, to be quickly described, analysed and catalogued for science before they ‘disappeared’ as naturally as one season disappears into another. There arises in this a paradox: genocidal practice combined with the apparent sympathy of curiosity. In the Australian colonies of the last half of the nineteenth century this paradox was no more greatly manifest than in the person of Edward M Curr — enough in itself to make him the subject of analysis, but Curr is even more ripe for study since, as Samuel Furphy shows in this biography, he has had a particularly potent afterlife.'  (Introduction)