Author(s): Robert Foster

Aust History

In 1849, James Brown, a South Australian pastoralist, was charged with shooting dead nine Aboriginal people. Unable to find witnesses, the crown was forced to drop the case despite the magistrate's conviction of his guilt. Two generations later, a glowing biography of Brown's life noted merely that he was involved in a charge of poisoning an Aboriginal man, but emerged from the trial with a clean slate. Fatal Collisions is about violence on the Australian frontier and the ways in which it has been remembered. The stories it tells take place in that fluid zone where history, memory and myth meet in popular consciousness.