Reading Robinson

This reprint - originally published by Quintus Publishing - brings together essays by leading Australian and international historians in an analysis of the monumental Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley and republished in 2008. Until this book, Friendly Mission has rarely been considered in a context beyond the immediacy of "Van Diemen's Land" (the original European name for Tasmania). Yet, George Augustus Robinson's diverse writings constitute a body of work that typically has one set of meanings for local readers, and another for those outside its sphere of production. Robinson's texts are exemplary of the ways in which colonial texts circulated around what Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, has called 'imperial networks.' Reading Robinson, while remaining cognizant of local resonances, extends Friendly Mission from parochial particularity and situates it within international contexts, both in terms of contemporary accounts of colonial/settler contact, conflict with indigenes, and current scholarship analyzing this material.