Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book retells key elements of the foundational story of Australia: the meeting between Indigenous people and colonists and the entangled world that resulted. It offers a nuanced reinterpretation of the evolving inter-cultural world, shedding fresh light on well-known episodes and recovering new lives and exchanges. By tracing some of the people, networks, rituals, objects, and activities that patterned New South Wales as it grew outwards from Sydney, it demonstrates that the period between 1800 and 1835 was a distinct period before key threads of the inter-cultural world began to fray. Though riven by friction and shadowed by violence, the strategies, desires, and diplomatic culture of Aboriginal people shaped the colony. In changing, challenging conditions, clans worked towards a multicultural future, deftly ducking and weaving to forward the interests of their people through a mix of old and new strategies. In reading and tracing the movement and interactions of people and material cultures, the records suggest colonial lives of greater dynamism, diplomacy, and negotiation than have been fully told. With its scholarly depth, focus on material culture, and its engaging narrative style, this volume will appeal to popular as well as academic readers in history, anthropology, and Indigenous studies as well as curators, archivists, and librarians in and beyond settler-colonial sites.</jats:p>