Double Vision serves as a prequel to Among Australian Pioneers, which highlighted the experience of Chinese indentured laborers on the northern frontier from 1848 to 1880—a time of intense conflict. With this latest book, historian Margaret Slocomb responds to a call for more regional histories of early contact relations, so we can understand their complexity as well as the diversity of reactions and responses that followed. The author observes that encounters at the margins of settlement between new societies seeking profits and traditional owners defending their land are bruising, brutal affairs conducted beyond the reach of regular norms and conventions, and contested within a framework of conflicting, mutually incomprehensible and irreconcilable laws. The Northern Districts of Wide Bay and Burnett on the tribal lands of the Kabi Kabi and Wakka Wakka nations represented that frontier from roughly 1845 until Queensland formed a separate colony in 1859. Dispossession was violent by its very nature, but there was also accommodation and adaptation on one side, and compassionate advocacy on the other. Join the author as she seeks if not the full truth, at least a unified understanding of our shared history and mutual recognition of its contested nature.
