Vale Inga Clendinnen
Inga Vivienne Clendinnen AO, FAHA, author, historian, anthropologist and academic died yesterday aged 82. What a sad loss to the Australian life of the mind. Clendinnen's sharp insights and beautiful prose were (for me) best displayed in Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (2003, Text Publishing). This small but perfectly formed exploration of the relationships and interactions between the Europeans and the first Australians in the earliest years of white settlement in NSW is a book I have returned to many times. Clendinnen illuminates without failing to [...]