Bluff Rock

Katrina M. Schlunke grew up in the New England area, and that local connection frames her study. Her book follows one event: the massacre or massacres of Aboriginal people at Bluff Rock, in New England, during the 1840s. Rather than treating the killings as a settled account, she examines the many ways the event has been organised into memory, and what those forms reveal about relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

The author looks into the concealed histories of encounters between Aboriginal people and settlers, and engages urgently with the difficulties that surround the writing of history in Australia.