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    Short Black 3 The War of the Worlds
    Short Black 3 The War of the Worlds
    Short Black 3 The War of the Worlds
    Ebook48 pages29 minutes

    Short Black 3 The War of the Worlds

    By Noel Pearson

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    About this ebook

    How many Australians born in the 137 years since Truganini's death learnt her legend and scarcely thought deeper about the enormity of the loss she represented, and the history that led to it? Her spirit casts a long shadow over Australian history, but we have nearly all of us found a way to avert our eyes from its meaning.

    In The War of the Worlds, Noel Pearson considers the most confronting issue of Australian history: the question of genocide, in early Tasmania and elsewhere. With eloquence and passion, he explores the 'emotional convulsions of identification and memory' that he feels on encountering these events. Re-reading Dickens and Darwin, Pearson acknowledges the 'fatal logic' of the colonial project, and seeks to draw out its meaning for Australians today.

    Short Blacks are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

    Noel Pearson is a lawyer and activist, and the founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership. He is the author of Up from the Mission and two acclaimed Quarterly Essays, Radical Hope and A Rightful Place.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateSep 23, 2015
    ISBN9781925203493
    Short Black 3 The War of the Worlds
    Author

    Noel Pearson

    Noel Pearson is a lawyer and activist, and the founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership. He is the author of Up from the Mission and two acclaimed Quarterly Essays, Radical Hope and A Rightful Place.

    Read more from Noel Pearson

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      Book preview

      Short Black 3 The War of the Worlds - Noel Pearson

      Worlds

      A PERSONAL QUADRANT OF THE AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE

      I came upon this foreword some years ago when sharing an enthusiasm of my youth for H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds with my young son. Even as he makes his way through his own all-consuming passions of boyhood – Thomas, the Crocodile Hunter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, Minecraft and now Harry Potter – I indulge my own nostalgia by sharing those things that possessed me when I was a boy. We’ve done Richard III, to which we will doubtless return. We’ve read Charles Portis’s masterpiece True Grit, and watched the original John Wayne film and the Coen brothers’ remake a hundred times. We’ve acted out the shoot-out scenes; he’s always Rooster. We are yet to get to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles. His younger sister and I have started Great Expectations.

      First turned on by Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds in early high school, aware of Orson Welles’ radio hoax and having read the Wells book, I was stunned to have been unaware of the inspiration for the idea of a Martian invasion of England – its origin in what was called the extirpation of the original Tasmanians. I was disquieted that the source of this extraordinary production in world culture was unknown to me. I knew it was likely unknown to everyone around me, and to almost all of my fellow Australians. How come?

      H.G. Wells knew of the original Tasmanians, but that did not mean he felt empathy for the fate of this inferior race at the hands of the British. Instead he subscribed to the scientific racism of his era, believing them Palaeolithic, and writing, The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.

      In The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (2014), the English historian Tom Lawson shows how the destruction of the Tasmanians played out in British culture. We will return to Lawson’s contribution to the debate on genocide in Tasmania soon, after we lift the scales from our eyes concerning some of the most revered figures of that culture in

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