'Dancing With Strangers' is the most important and compulsively readable book about Australian history and identity to appear for many years.
Inga Clendinnen tells the story of what happened between the British settlers of New South Wales and the Australian inhabitants they found there. "These people mixed with ours," wrote James Bradley a few days after the First Fleet made landfall in 1788, "and all hands danced together."
Clendinnen, the distinguished historian of early Spanish America and award-winning author of 'Tiger's Eye' and 'Reading The Holocaust', turns her incomparable eye to the extraordinary events attending the first British settlement in Australia. She offers a fresh reading of reports, letters and journals of British participants to reconstruct the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader Bennelong; and then traces the painful destruction of that hard-won friendship as profound cultural differences asserted themselves.
