"It’s possible that all history-writing has an element of soul-stealing. I have tried in this work, nonetheless, to inject as much detail and subtlety into Bennelong’s life story as my sources could yield. I have done so not only to reverse common misunderstandings about Bennelong (most of them invented in the early 1800s), but also to revise prevailing assumptions about Aboriginal society being simple or ill-fated through the initial period of colonisation."

Fulluger's entwined reverse histories of Bennelong and Phillip is a provoking and intriguing read. Fullager takes the two figures together, noting that Bennelong is never discussed without Phillip, and that Phillip increasingly rarely is viewed without Bennelong. However, she reverses the order of the telling: we start with an examination of their graves, and trace backwards to their births (and a little beyond). Interestingly, this simple switch causes a very different narrative to emerge in their lives, as our impressions form from their later life actions, not their former. It is an interesting trick, and one which reveals how important the process of storytelling becomes to history, and how it can distort our perspectives.
With Phillip, Fullager uses his later years to emphasise the military leader's commitment to British expansionism, and to position his time in Sydney as a part of a British career, not a break with it into a new country. With Bennelong, her contention is more around a differential reading of sources, which she uses to argue that his later years have been consistently misrepresented as being divorced from his culture, when they demonstrate the opposite. In reality, much of Fullager's portrayal rests on this differing interpretation, rather than the revelation of viewing history backwards.
Fullager makes a strong case for her read on both men, and this book will undoubtably shift the needle in the stories we like to tell ourselves. However, while there was new detail here for me, mostly on Phillip (the account of what appears to be collusion in facilitating a lesbian relationship through a marriage of convenience was the most intriguing) the main impact on me of the narrative was to cause me to wonder again at how history can reflect the times and beliefs of the historian more than the subject. So much of our sense of self can rest on whether Phillip was a villain or a hero, a beset humanitarian in an impossible situation or a conqueror with little care for the humans he conquered. None of these have ever felt fully human to me, or respecting that as much as founding our nation might be important to us, it may not have been so important to those who did it.
With Bennelong, I am reminded again how much we interpret from so little. I appreciate this book in challenging held beliefs but can subscribe less to its fervent arguments for new ones. We have a richer understanding of Yiyara cultures now, and this can inform those readings. However, I feel there is still danger in making him into who we want him to be, being unwilling to acknowledge how much of him remains unknown, and in this way, fill in blanks with who we want him to be.

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