AustLit

'Any attempt to capture the complexity of first ‘contact’ between Indigenous peoples and European visitors has to contend with sparse and often contradictory accounts, where the gap of understanding – both then and now – is far greater than any narrow bridges thrown across it. It is for this reason that the space between observation and imagination in the context of early cross-cultural encounters has always been fertile ground, explored both through academic texts (think of the contributions from Greg Dening's long career, particularly his Beach Crossings (2004), or edited conference volumes, such as Veth et al.'s Strangers on the Shore (2008)) and other works (the 2015–16 joint National Museum of Australia/British Museum  exhibition Encounters springs to mind). (Introduction)