The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history â" the colonised and coloniser â" and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.
Shortlisted for the 2025 National Biography Award
Winner of the 2024 ACT Literary Award, Non-Fiction
Winner of the Canberra Criticsâ Circle Award 2024, History/Biography
Shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Ministerâs 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 colonyâs first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.
Fullagarâs 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 menâs marriages, including Bennelongâs best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillipâs 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. Bennelongâs world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagarâs approach his and Phillipâs histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.
Industry Reviews
‘Rich and exciting history telling … brave, audacious … has the reader thinking deeply about the meaning of history and the role it plays in our lives … Fullagar’s position is ethically scrupulous, and highly objective in research and exposition … I recommend this as a book that carries us much further on the journey to a reconciled future – and a delicious read to boot.’
