AustLit

'Violence and intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected in the shaping of colonial economies.  Extending a reading of ‘economies’ as labour relations into new arenas, this innovative collection of essays examines new understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy in settler colonial economies of the British Pacific Rim. The sites it explores include cross-cultural exchange in sealing and maritime communities, labour relations on the frontier, inside the pastoral station and in the colonial home, and the material and emotional economies of exploration.  Following the curious mobility of texts, objects, and frameworks of knowledge, this volume teases out the diversity of ways in which violence and intimacy were expressed in the economies of everyday encounters on the ground. In doing so, it broadens the horizon of debate about the nature of colonial economies and the intercultural encounters that were enmeshed within them.'

Source: Abstract.

'In 1849, James Brown, a south Australian pastoralist, was charged with shooting dead nine Aboriginal people. Unable to find witnesses, the crown was forced to drop the case even though the magistrate was convinced of his guilt. Two generations later, a glowing biography of Brown's life noted merely that he was involved in a charge of poisoning an Aboriginal man, but emerged from trial with a clean slate. Why had the story changed so much: from shooting to poisoning, from nine victims to one, from evading trial to being found innocent? What forces were at play in reshaping the memory of this event? 

'Fatal Collisions is about violence on the South Australian frontier and the ways in which it has been remembered in Anglo-Australian accounts of the past. The stories it tells take place in that fluid zone where history, memory and myth meet in popular consciousness.' (Publication summary)