AustLit

'In this important and challenging book, Liz Conor analyses in compelling fashion a range of settler impressions of Aboriginal women circulating in vernacular settler colonial print culture. Deeply aware that these disturbing images have been powerfully destructive historically and continue to cause hurt, Conor insists nonetheless that we must look at them more closely if we are to better understand the violence, misogyny and disavowal embedded within settler colonialisms past and present. Conor seeks to unveil a way of ‘knowing’ that may be skin deep but has been influential in shaping settler understandings of racial difference. Everyday images intersected in complex ways with the truth claims of expert or eyewitness accounts (for example, in the records of early explorers) and Conor follows their multivalences and circulations via the coincidence between industrialised print culture and colonialism itself. Her insightful interrogations illustrate how diverse sources often ‘strewn across time and place’ came to create ‘everyday cultural meaning’ (67).' (Introduction)

'The late 1920s saw an extraordinary protest by an Australian Aboriginal man on the streets of London. Standing outside Australia House, cloaked in tiny skeletons, Anthony Martin Fernando condemned the failure of British rule in his country.

'Fernando is believed to be the first Aboriginal person to protest conditions in Australia from the streets of Europe. His various forms of action, from pamphlets on the streets of Rome to the famous Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, distinguish this lone protestor as a unique Aboriginal activist of his time.

'Drawn from an extensive search in archives from Australia and Europe, this is the first full-length study of Fernando and the self-professed mission that was to last half of his adult life.

'Paisley brings to light new episodes in Fernando's activist career as well as previously unknown details about his extraordinary life in Australia and overseas. Her account dramatically shifts our understanding of the international reach of Aboriginal protest in this era.' (From the publisher's website.)

This essay investigates Anthony Martin Fernando's life of self imposed exile and his overseas protests concerning the failure of British justice in Australia.