Dancing with Strangers

I've finally started reading Dancing with Strangers by Inga Clendinnen, almost five years after it was first published (in other words, five years too late). I've come to it having just read Kate Grenville's The Secret River, which tells a fictional historical tale of the clash between the British and the aboriginal people of the Hawkesbury River in the late 18th century. There is something about the histories and narratives of early colonial Australia that I find I'm drawn to, even though the sense of loss in these tellings and re-tellings can be unbearable; perhaps it is an interest in origins or an attraction to the tragic. I think it is also a curiosity of wanting to know what it was like to live then in such a strangely different (to British eyes) place.

Clendinnen's writing is so strikingly clear and her interest in the ethnographic, as well as the historic, engages with the confusions and the fog of life as it is lived. This follows in the vein of Greg Dening's account of the mutiny - and aftermath - on the Bounty in Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (1992). Clendinnen writes in her 'Introduction' (p.3):

Historians' main occupational hazard is being culture-insensitive, anthropologists' is insensitivity to temporal change. Both can be insensitive to the reciprocating dynamic between action and context. Together, however, they are formidable, and in my view offer the best chance of explaining what we humans do in any particular circumstance, and why we do it.

I'll post a few more choice quotes over the coming week ...