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Fatal Collisions

Fatal Collisions

The South Australian frontier and the violence of memory

Robert Foster, Rick Hosking, Amanda Nettelbeck

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 the 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.

Winner of the 2002 John Tregenza prize for South Australian History
Shortlisted for the 2002 NSW Premier's Prize for Literature

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Robert Foster is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. Robert works especially in the area of Australian and comparative Indigenous History.

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Rick Hosking is an Associate Professor in English, Creative Writing, and Australian Studies at Flinders University where he teaches Australian Studies, colonial literary studies, historical fiction and travel writing. He co-authored with Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck Fatal Collisions: the South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory.

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Amanda Nettelbeck is Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. Her previous co-authored books, also published by Wakefield Press, are Fatal Collisions: The South Australian frontier and the violence of memory (with Rick Hosking, 2001) and In the Name of the Law: William Willshire and the policing of the Australian frontier (2007).

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ISBN   
CATEGORIES: ,
PAGE COUNT   176
DIMENSIONS   210 x 140 mm