Bennelong and Phillip

The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both. Winner of the 2024 ACT Literary Award, Non-Fiction Winner of the Canberra Critics’ Circle Award 2024, History/Biography Shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Australian History Shortlisted for the 2024 NSW History Award, Australian History Prize and NSW Community and Regional History Prize Shortlisted for the 2024 Age Book of the Year, Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2024 Ernest Scott Prize Shortlisted for the 2024 Magarey Medal for Biography 2023 Australian Book Review Books of the Year 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of the Year Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled. Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire. To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing. To help this seeing-afresh – and to dig down through the layers of interpretation that have been filled in over the facts – Fullagar adopts a fresh method: she tells the story backwards, starting with the ends of their lives, and mirroring the direction of history’s constant question, ‘why did this happen?’ And by looking at their whole lives, she shows that although in our eyes their encounter was the crescendo of their lives, the men themselves didn’t see it that way: Phillip’s gravestone makes no mention of his being the first governor of New South Wales; arguably, Bennelong thought of his most important battles as being against neighbouring tribes. We place them at the start of a new nation; they thought of themselves as being part of much older ones. In seeing their perspectives, we better understand both them and the uses their stories have been put to. Challenging, inspiring, innovative, Bennelong and Phillip embraces all that’s exciting in the modern approach to Australia’s history.