Patricia Fara on a book that untangles colonial relationships
Greg Dening was an exceptional historian. He was an Australian Jesuit who had abandoned the priesthood in protest against the indictment of abortion, and continued to dissect his own prejudices while probing the limits of academic enquiry.
When this book appeared, I had been living abroad, first in Berlin and then in Canberra. Those immersions in different cultures made me appreciate that histories have a global map: the past may be another country, but describing how they do things there depends on a tourist’s origins. In Australia, “history from below” – the everyday stories of everyday people – had become commonplace long before Britain stopped celebrating dead white generals.
Australia, a former dominion possessed by an exploitative empire, was also grappling with its own relationships between indigenous inhabitants and colonial settlers. The Death of William Gooch is a deceptively slim volume about a British naval astronomer who was murdered in 1792 on a Hawaiian beach. Its abundant illustrations complement Dening’s scrupulous investigations of early encounters between European travellers and Pacific islanders. I was particularly stunned by the long section dispassionately inspecting 18th-century Cambridge, my home territory both as a historian and a resident. I felt subjected to the gaze of an all-seeing anthropologist who was ruthlessly exposing the bizarre rituals of my own existence.
Dening’s book changed my life: it altered my approach to other places and peoples, both past and present.