Bluff Rock

"The past is a problem for us. We know certain events happened, sometimes exactly when and yet our longing for certainty cannot be satisfied ... we tell stories about where we come from and who we are. We change these stories sometimes minutely, sometimes radically ... This is an original and courageous book. Schlunke, who grew up in the New England area, takes this one story — the massacre(s) of Aborigines at Bluff Rock, in New England during the 1840s — and looks at the many ways it is organised as a memory of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Schlunke breaks new ground as she probes the 'hidden histories' of Indigenous-settler encounters and addresses herself urgently to the problems of 'history' in Australia."