From its earliest years, South Australia was the most German of the Australian colonies.
As they contributed to the founding and consolidation of a British colony, Germans observed the processes of dispossession and subjugation that changed the lives of First Nations peoples around them forever. More than that, they participated in those profound and tragic changes. Importantly, German settlers and visitors left behind records of the events they witnessed.
This volume collects those precious records and makes them available - most for the first time in English - to a modern Australian readership. It charts the course of German-Australian encounters from first contacts, through the ruptures and violence of a relentlessly expanding European presence and into the twentieth century. As it documents the astounding cultural wealth and complexity of Indigenous peoples under siege, it also lays bare the grim logic of the forces driving their world towards destruction.
With the Barossa Valley and Hahndorf still showing their influence today, South Australia was once the most German of the colonies. Now a new book is shedding light on the interactions of these early settlers with Indigenous Australians.
Edited by Flinders University’s Professor Peter Monteath and Professor Matthew Fitzpatrick, with cultural advice from Kaurna and Narungga man Dennis O’Brien, An Indigenous South: German writers on colonial South Australia, offers a unique exploration into the role German settlers, missionaries, and anthropologists played in shaping colonial relations with Indigenous Australians.