The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World by Shino Konishi, 231 pp, Pickering & Chatto, London, 2012, ISBN 9781848932166 (hbk), 9781848932173 (ebook), $169.95.

As this review goes to press Shino Konishi’s masterly book is shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s History Award and I for one would not be surprised if it is successful, marking a wonderful achievement for a first book. Whether or not this happens, this is a landmark work that illustrates perfectly the sometimes elusive paradigm of ‘good history’; that work that is marked only by a perfect rendition of the sources, untainted by theory. The scope of this book is a remarkable feat for an early career researcher. Certainly its inclusion as the eighth book in the prestigious Pickering & Chatto, Body, Gender and Culture Series is indicative of its intrinsic value as history. It is wonderful to see a publisher that values such fine scholarship and allows and values such a rich lode of endnotes in this volume.

This book illuminates the earliest of the encounters of European explorers with Aboriginal people on the coast of Australia in such a way that the unguarded humanity of the players is foregrounded. In fact, as Konishi explains, it is the bodies of each that were of the greatest interest to each other. They were interested to explore the extent and the limits of their admittedly culture-bound ideas of humanity, from the bodily functions of eating and drinking, speaking, eliminating, to the preference for adornments, communications, physical prowess including in battle and in sexual activity. They went so far as to be ‘touching, scrutinizing, grooming and adorning one another’s bodies’ and of course as Konishi reminds us, contact itself means to touch. The order of chapters into ‘Skin’, ‘Hair’, ‘Face’, ‘Carnal Bodies’, ‘Martial Bodies’, ‘Communicating Bodies’, ‘Indolent Bodies’ and ‘Testing Bodies’ reflects this and also suggests very close reading, organisation and documentation of the records.

Embodied encounters in the Enlightenment world are influenced too by the ideas of the superiority of man in the state of nature, perhaps a trifle threatening to the European male of the time who emerged from an urban world. These early expeditions were interested to establish how the native man was measuring up, by concentrating on documenting everything possible about the people they came across and making critical assessments and comparisons of them in the context of their social and cultural milieu.

The encounters of the explorers and Aboriginal men are described in such a way as to become snapshots in time, made possible by the careful observations and records of the eighteenth century expeditions that Konishi has researched. These are more leisurely encounters than those of earlier explorers and qualitatively and quantitatively different from those that followed in the intensity of colonisation. The ideology of the Enlightenment and the interest in man in a state of nature, was importantly a product of the extreme wealth generated by slavery and colonisation whereby wealthy patrons sought to support a wholesale quest for knowledge. Further opportunities for investment were also welcomed of course. In the 33 years between 1770 and 1803 the coast of Australia was like the proverbial Pitt Street Sydney; more than 20 European expeditions landed here.

Accounts by the Englishmen Joseph Banks, James Cook, Tobias Furneaux, Watkin Tench, David Collins, Matthew Flinders, the limited accounts of the Spaniard Alexandro Malaspina, and the more extensive accounts of the French Nicolas Baudin, Marc-Joseph Marion-Defresne, Antoine-Raymond-Joseph Bruny d’Entrecasteaux, Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière, Jean-Francois de Galaup de La Perouse, and especially those of Francois Péron are examined for this volume. These are the men on expeditions that met Aboriginal people and were able to engage with them for some time, or who were a part of the early colony at Port Jackson.

Konishi is not only a masterly scholar but she has a particularly light and nuanced turn of phrase that engages the reader from the first. For example, I found the introduction to this book more exciting and immediate than any that I can recall. Konishi makes these often ‘mundane’ encounters between men that were ‘often tense, sometimes perplexing and occasionally convivial’ (p. 4) and the debates that surround them alive and engaging, of absolute import to contemporary issues in Aboriginal Australia.

Victoria Grieves

University of Sydney