Kate Fullagar will discuss the background, research, writing, and unusual methodology of her third monograph, Bennelong & Phillip (Simon & Schuster, 2023). This book offers a dual biography of Arthur Phillip (1738-1814), the inaugural governor of New South Wales, and of Bennelong (c1764-1813), the Wangal warrior who became Phillip’s most important Indigenous point of contact. For a brief period Bennelong and Phillip were the most influential leaders of their respective communities during the critical period of contact. Bennelong journeyed with Phillip to London when the governor retired, staying three years. The book unravels their entwined stories by plotting them in reverse order, starting in the present and moving back from the men’s deaths, their retirements, their last actions, their time together in London, then their time together in Sydney, their meeting, their back stories, their early lives and then their origins in blood and place.

Kate Fullagar FAHA is professor of history at the Australian Catholic University and co-editor of the Australian Historical Association’s journal, History Australia. She is the award-winning author of The Savage Visit (UC Press, 2012) and The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020), and editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). She is lead CI of an ARC Linkage project with the NPG called ‘Facing New Worlds.'