Can I read A narrative of a visit to the Australian colonies on EtoBox?

A narrative of a visit to the Australian colonies by James Backhouse. -- is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is A narrative of a visit to the Australian colonies about?

Backhouse’s A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies provides valuable evidence of life in Van Diemen’s Land in the early nineteenth century. He recorded conversations with people who had been part of the first settlement in 1804. A young woman who had been a child at the time recalled being left in the care of Aborigines, while an ex-marine who had stayed on in the colony to earn a good living hunting kangaroos and emus, recalled confronting a giant forester kangaroo, nine feet high, on the site of the barracks in Hobart and often falling in with bands of Aborigines, ‘in whom there was then no harm’. He told Backhouse that the Aborigines hurt no one until two white men, charged with murder, escaped from Port Dalrymple and ‘got among them’. Backhouse and Walker visited the Aborigines on Flinders Island and showed an interest in their welfare. They did not share the disdain voiced by most colonists. When they came together socially, Walker observed, the Aborigines ‘are like so many brothers and sisters’. He denied their intellectual inferiority. ‘They exceeded the Europeans in skill, in those things to which their attention had been directed in childhood’, he wrote, ‘just a

Author

James Backhouse. --

Publisher

New York: Johnson Reprint Corp

Published

1967

Language

EN