Tasmania became an island separate from the rest of Australia around 14 000 years ago, during the final warming phase of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. As global temperatures increased towards modern levels and sea levels rose because of the melting ice caps, Australia's shorelines changed, closing the land bridge between Tasmania and the continent, and later that between Australia and New Guinea. From that time, Tasmania's cultures developed in isolation - an extreme case, some would say, of the more general isolation of Australian cultures, though people hardly feel deprived of contact when they know nothing of anywhere beyond the connections of their daily lives. Tasmanians and those from what is now the mainland turned their backs on each other and lived without knowledge of the other for 14 000 years. Now, by virtue of the creation of a single nation through processes of colonisation and federation, the communities on each side of Bass Strait are both identified as Aborigines, as a consequence of not being non-Aboriginal people of Australia.

On 26 January 1988, Australia's Bicentenary day, I was among the 100 000 heat-stroked crowd crammed on the shores of Sydney Harbour, experiencing the majestic spectacle of the Tall Ships. For all the exhibition and excitement, it was a reflective occasion on which the 'national story' was revealed to be fractured and multifaceted. My outstanding memories, next to sunburn and claustrophobia, are of Aboriginal Protesters greeting the ships with shrill slogans and theatrical gestures. On the same day, in Kings Cross, a dear friends, who mischievously weaved among the crowds in a pyjama-style convict costume, ended the day badly when he was set upon and mildly beaten by a group of young Aboriginal men. While that incident was contrary to the mood of celebration, it was also somewhat emblematic of this politically and historically charged occasion. Of course, what is commemorated on 26 January is the arrival in 1788 of what later became known as 'the First Fleet'. Of the many turning points in our national story, the foundation event - European Australia's moment of original - seems an obvious, indeed inevitable, subject for commemoration. It is also the most ripe for interrogation, and most malleable to the disparate cultural and political sensitivities and interests of contemporary generations. By tracing the remembrance of the moment over time and across generations, we can chart some of the changing and conflicting ideas of Australian identity. In the case of the arrival of the First Fleet and the foundation of the European Australia, the moment is forever flavoured by certain characteristics and circumstances embedded in the event which have proved awkward to later generation of Australians. January 26 1788 is a crucial moment in Australian history both because of what happened and how it has been remembered.

Archaeological experimental studies have been conducted on taphonomic and artefact disturbances worldwide. Studies conducted have addressed various disturbance factors such as wind, water, animal activity, and human impact independently of one another. Generally, these studies were on a small scale with regard to the geographic range and environmental contexts covered. Additionally, no mitigation or site extent analyses have been conducted that would facilitate the management of moving and missing artefacts. The experiment was spread out over five locations in the New England Tablelands in NSW. These locations were at Barley Fields, Uralla, Kirby Farm and the University of New England Deer Park Armidale, Big Llangothlin, Llangothlin and Laura Creek west of Guyra. All locations experienced varying degrees of disturbance due to livestock, kangaroos, deer, rabbits, different slope gradient, soil, vegetation and human activity. Movement, breakage, and disappearance were common artefact disturbances in the New England Tablelands within a short six month period. Artefacts that were nor moved or moved up to seven metres experienced some breakage in less than a month, some artefacts had disappeared and some of these reappeared because of animal or human activity and environmental changes. One focus of the study was to investigate the effects of slopes on artefact movements over time. The degree of slope gradient was found not to be as significant to artefact movement as previously thought; rather, movement was due mostly to other post-depositional processes, which are discussed in this thesis. Archaeologists need to consider the potential post-depositional disturbances when determining the extremities of a stone artefact scatter. From a cultural resource management perspective it is more likely that sites recorded without these considerations may be more difficult to locate when the site is revisited for construction.

'Australia's Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era', by Babette Smith, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 408 pp., $49.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781741146042. 'A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal', by Babette Smith, 2nd ed., Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 328 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN 9781741755510. 'Voices from Tocal: Convict Life on a Rural Estate', by Brian Walsh, Tocal, C.B. Alexander Foundation, 2008, 144 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780731306107. 'Closing Hell's Gates: The Death of a Convict Station', by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 324 pp., $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781741751499. 'Tour to Hell: Convict Australia's Great Escape Myths', by David Levell, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2008, 296 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780702236860. ... If convict history is Australia's 'beloved burden', as Marian Quarterly claims, then in the early years of the new millennium there were relatively few historians willing to share the load. It is now twenty years since Robert Hughes rummaged through the closet of Australia's penal past and paraded its contents before an international audience; twenty years, too, since we were invigorated by the assertive revisionism of the 'Convict Workers' project and the Bicentenary's official ambivalence towards the criminal component of our national story. While these developments briefly re-energised interest in convict history, they also appeared to have exhausted it for a time. Admittedly, some wonderful work arose out of postgraduate research in the years after 2001, and a miscellany was sprinkled through peer-reviewed journals. But otherwise it seemed that the topic had fallen from favour, as if there was little more to be gained from interrogating the most distant chapter of our national story. As an anonymous assessor indelicately noted on my grant application a few years ago, 'surely there can be nothing left to say about convict history'. It was therefore most welcome to see 2008 bring a flurry of new scholarship, with several excellent works exploring the rich and instructive world of Australia's reluctant pioneers.

Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was often the scene of conflict, as Europeans seized the land and its resources, and its original owners fought back. The extent of conflict and the degree of violence are matters of much controversy.This book, based on a forum held at the National Museum of Australia, presents a series of essays by leading contributors to the debate. The different historical and political perspectives make a major contribution to the study of cross-cultural relations in Australia's past and provide valuable background for anyone who wishes to understand relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians today.

The Anglican Church Missionary Society's Wellington Valley mission (1832–43) was one of the most ambitious and important religious experiments attempted in early nineteenth-century Australia. Located on the very western fringe of the British colony of New South Wales, amid the remains of an abandoned convict settlement, the mission provided the setting for competing assertions of status, authority and morality, played out in complex interactions between evangelists, Aborigines and British settlers/servants. This article explores those interactions through a particular focus on the built environment of the mission station. To contribute to our understanding of how the grand ideologies of evangelical Christianity played out and faltered on a local level, I argue that the material facilities occupied by the mission reflected and exaggerated many of the shortcomings and conundrums of the missionary agenda, and that infrastructural and spatial difficulties contributed markedly to its failure.

Oral traditions, especially contrasted with written history, are typically portrayed as inaccurate. Commenting on native title claims in the US, Simic (2000) made the specific claim: "As a general rule, unwritten legends that refer to events more than 1,000 years in the past contain little, if any, historical truth". So can preliterate Indigenous languages tell us anything factual about the distant past, or does the transmission of historical facts become inevitably corrupted? Changes in sea levels around the Australian coast are now well established. Marine geographers can now point to specific parts of the Australian coast and know with some confidence what the sea levels were at a particular time before the present. This paper reports on a substantial body of Australian Aboriginal stories that appear to represent genuine and unique observations of post-glacial increases in sea level, at time depths that range from about 13,400-7,500 years BP. This paper makes the case that endangered Indigenous languages can be repositories for factual knowledge across time depths far greater than previously imagined, forcing a rethink of the ways in which such traditions have been dismissed.

When the troops of the 40th and 12th Regiments stormed the stockade at Eureka in the early hours of Sunday 3 December 1854, there were, firing back at them, a motley and multicultural collection of Ballarat miners. Most were white European males, but there were among them a few men of African origin. One soldier later said he thought 'There were a good many black men' in the stockade. In the mid-nineteenth century these 'black men' were referred to by many names, but the most common racial epithet was 'men of colour' or, to distinguish them from Asians and other non-White races, 'Black Americans', 'Negroes' or 'niggers'. In Australia at least, such terms described anyone who was 'racially' African, be he from Africa, North America or the Caribbean.

The islands and coasts of northern Australia are the cradle of Australian maritime history. For at least the last 300 years the region has attracted a diverse host of international seafaring visitors who encountered and related with a variety of coastal Aboriginal communities. Primarily these were Asian visitors,particularly Macassans who, from around the early to mid 1700s, sailed annually from southern Sulawesi in vast flotillas to harvest trepang (beche-de-mer) for export to China. The British first sailed the coastlines of northern Australia in the early 1800s, though long before them, there were Dutch visitors to northern Australia. The area subsequently comprises a long and unique zone of crossculturalcontact in Australia.Much has been written about these voyages, mostly from the voyager's view, though there is an expanding literature on the impact of this traffic on Aboriginal society. This article considers aspects of the region's maritime history from the perspective of the Aboriginal artists who documented their encounters in rock paintings on the ledges and caves of this region. Aboriginal association with outsiders and the consequent introduction of foreign objects and knowledge is reflected in a number of 'historical paintings' or 'contact art', depicting introduced, non-Indigenous subjects and themes, especially ships, but also firearms, tobacco, pipes, axes, houses, horses and aeroplanes. Maritime vessels are the predominant subject of that contact art, attesting to the importance of sea-faring vessels as defining symbols of the technology and culture of foreigners.

Of all the various infections that afflicted Aboriginal people in Australia during the years of first contact with Europeans, smallpox was the most disastrous. The physical and social impacts of the disease are well known. This article considers another effect of the contagion. It is argued that a nativist movement in the form of a waganna (dance ritual) associated with the Wiradjuri spirit Baiame and his adversary Tharrawiirgal was linked to the aftermath of the disease as it was experienced at the settlement site of the Wellington Valley of New South Wales (NSW). The discovery of this movement is of considerable significance for an understanding of Aboriginal responses to colonization in southeastern Australia. It is the earliest well-attested nativist movement in Australian ethnohistory.

In 1785, when he fronted the House of Commons Committee on Transportation, Sir Joseph Banks was unquestionably the person best qualified to extol the virtues of New South Wales (NSW). Banks spoke with the authority of an aristocrat and eminent scientist. He was the president of the Royal Society and, of course, one of the very few gentlemen to have actually seen the southern continent first-hand. It had been 15 years since he and Captain James Cook had led the Endeavour along the east coast of Australia, returning home with their cargo of specimens, maps and wonderful tales of a far-off world. Since then, no other Englishman had been near the place.Lord Beauchamp's Committee on Transportation was convened -- shortly after the British government legislated to resume its centuries-old practice of transporting convicted felons abroad -- to consider the best possible location for a new and unique British colony. Banks was one of numerous gentlemen lobbying the case for 'Botany Bay'. He assured the Committee that NSW was entirely amenable to the English settlement. It was fertile, well-stocked with fish and game, well-timbered and well-watered. But the bulk of the questions asked of him related to the 'inhabitants' - those of east-coast Australia in general, and of Botany Bay in particular. Was it 'much inhabited'? Were the people 'of a peace-able or hostile Disposition?' What was 'the nature of the government of which they lived', and might some site for a convict settlement 'be obtained by Cession or purchase'? Banks' responses to these questions are well-known. There were 'very few inhabitants', he said. Though they 'seemed inclined to Hostilities they did not appear at-all to be feared.' ... Ultimately, Banks was asked if he thought a contingent of colonists stepping ashore at Botany Bay might meet with any 'obstruction' serious enough to prevent a settlement being formed. 'Certainly not', he replied. '[F]rom the experience I have had of the Natives of another part of the same Coast I am inclined to believe they would speedily abandon the Country to New Comers'. 1

WINDRADYNE (c.1800-1829), Aboriginal resistance leader, also known as SATURDAY, was a northern Wiradjuri man of the upper Macquarie River region in central-western New South Wales. Emerging as a key protagonist in a period of Aboriginal-settler conflict later known as the 'Bathurst Wars', in December 1823 'Saturday' was named as an instigator of clashes between Aborigines and settlers that culminated in the death of two convict stockmen at Kings Plains. He was arrested and imprisoned at Bathurst for one month; it was reported that six men and a severe beating with a musket were needed to secure him. After some of the most violent frontier incidents of the period, including the killing of seven stockmen in the Wyagdon Ranges north of Bathurst and the murder of Aboriginal women and children by settler vigilantes near Raineville in May 1824, Governor Brisbane [q.v.1] placed the western district under martial law on 14 August. The local military was increased to seventy-five troops, and magistrates were permitted to administer summary justice. Windradyne's apparent involvement in the murder of European stockmen resulted in a reward of 500 acres (202.3 ha) being offered for his capture. The crisis subsided quickly, although the failure to capture Windradyne delayed the repeal of martial law until 11 December. Two weeks later he and a large number of his people crossed the mountains to Parramatta to attend the annual feast there, where he was formally pardoned by Brisbane.