ABSTRACT
The colonial process in Australia, which decimated the original inhabitants, expropriated their traditionally-held lands and segregated them on small reserves, has only recently received attention. The colonial occupation of the Macleay River Valley was a historical precipitate of the pastoral advance into northern New South Wales in the 1830s. Henderson depicts this colonial frontier in Excursions and Adventures in New South Wales, which is drawn from his own experiences as a pastoralist on the upper Macleay in the early 1840s. In effect, as he says, such attempts seek to impose a singular reality, some unity passing for transcendental truth, which ultimately desensitises and distorts our understanding of the terror and chaos of the colonial frontier. The importance of these colonial works, he argues, lies in their attempts to 'create uncertain reality out of fiction, giving shape and voice to the formless form of the reality in which an unstable interplay between truth and illusion becomes a phantasmic social force'.
