Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgements -- List of Illustrations -- Prologue -- PART 1: Picking at the Skin of Silence: Stories of My Parents and Grandparents -- 1 Growing up at 98 Upper Street -- 2 Alice (Al) Nivison and Euston Blomfield -- 3 Norma Nivison Blomfield -- 4 Jean Carty and George William Hope Davies -- 5 Thomas Alfred Davies (Tom) -- PART 2: Of Princes, Paupers and Soldiers: Stories of My Father's Family -- 6 Rodri Mawr, King of All Wales -- 7 Danish Princes and Princesses -- 8 David Campbell and the Bushrangers -- 9 From Soldier to Farmer to Magistrate: Thomas Alfred Davies and Maria Louisa Campbell -- 10 Small Selectors: Margaret Miles and Michael Carty -- PART 3: Of Judges and Surveyors, Sailors and Soldiers, Convicts and Farmers: Stories of My Mother's Family -- Introduction to Part 3 -- 11 The First Fleet. David Collins: Buried in Oblivion? -- 12 The Irish Uprising: Thomas Blomfield in Ireland -- 13 Richard Brooks: A Tragic Journey -- 14 Thomas Valentine (Val) Blomfield: At War with Napoleon -- 15 Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land: David Collins and His Descendants -- 16 Opening Up the Interior of New South Wales: William Cox -- 17 A Woman's View of the Colony: Christiana Brooks -- 18 From Soldier to Farmer: Thomas Valentine and Christiana Jane Brooks -- 19 Deputy Surveyor General: Samuel Perry and Surveying and Mapping the Land -- 20 From Scottish Tenant Farmers to Landed Gentry: Mary Wightman and Abraham Nivison -- Epilogue -- Appendix 1 -- Appendix 2 -- References -- Index of Authors -- Index of Subjects.

This book re-turns to the colonisation of New South Wales through the lives of the author's ancestors. By looking hard and listening carefully, by being prepared not to look away, and at the same time, by delving with love into the specificity of those ancestral lives, this research entangles the author, and the reader, in the acts of colonisation that are taken for granted in their present day lives. Through letters, journals, photos, portraits, newspaper clippings and official records, the author re-turns to the spacetimemattering of colonial lives. She finds the means to re-think the scarifications of the present, of people and landscapes. Bringing concepts from Deleuze and Barad, among others, she re-thinks the way history might be done.

Description based on print version record.