AustLit

'Tess Lea's Darwin unfolds as at once autobiography, history, and ethnography, nimbly traversing a series of difficult questions that must face such an ambitious project. How might one account for an abiding Indigenous presence, both historically and as a contemporary force in the Top End, while remaining attuned to other agencies, human and non-human, and their contribution to the shape this city takes? How might that story provide a critical counter-narrative to durable tropes of heroic settlement, colonial nostalgia, romantic primitivism and pastoral largesse? How might one celebrate Darwin's human diversity, its biological diversity, and its beauty and sensory particularity, without papering over the violence, at times wilful ignorance, and racialising force of recent history? And finally, last but I imagine far from least, how do you craft that story for a non-academic audience, opening the topic to critical reflection and taking seriously lessons learned in scholarship, ethnography and conversation? Darwin provides a sharp, riveting, and generative response to these and other questions in a narrative that speaks with audiences and interlocutors who will bring their own expectations and demands to reading. The book succeeds in this, in part, by mobilising and thinking through the senses, through sound, smell, and the lively, vulnerable surface of the skin. It also succeeds, I would argue, because of the manifest care and respect that Lea brings to her topic.'(Introduction)