A01=Barry Corr
accountability
Author_Barry Corr
Category=NHAH
Category=NHTQ
colonial conflict
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
erasure
forthcoming
frontier war
guilt
Hawkesbury
historiography
history wars
invasion
memory
Nepean
philosophy
settlement
social justice
Product details
- ISBN 9781761170423
- Dimensions: 153 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jul 2026
- Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
- Publication City/Country: AU
- Product Form: Paperback
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Surveying the Wild Abyss is a unique record of the Hawkesbury’s Frontier War and a contemplation on memory and atonement.
In this groundbreaking history of colonisation and frontier conflict in the Hawkesbury region, First Nations historian Barry Corr navigates the gaps and silences in the primary records to reveal settler amnesia, the cataclysmic nature of colonisation, and the way history is remembered, or not remembered. Driven by primary source analysis of colonial records, the book is deeply informed by Corr’s perspectives and community connections as an Aboriginal person who has lived most of his life in the Western Sydney Aboriginal community. Surveying the Wild Abyss reinvents the way Australian history is written and asks non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians to reflect on their history and consider what the future might look like.
In this groundbreaking history of colonisation and frontier conflict in the Hawkesbury region, First Nations historian Barry Corr navigates the gaps and silences in the primary records to reveal settler amnesia, the cataclysmic nature of colonisation, and the way history is remembered, or not remembered. Driven by primary source analysis of colonial records, the book is deeply informed by Corr’s perspectives and community connections as an Aboriginal person who has lived most of his life in the Western Sydney Aboriginal community. Surveying the Wild Abyss reinvents the way Australian history is written and asks non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians to reflect on their history and consider what the future might look like.
Barry Corr is an Aboriginal man who has lived most of his life near Dhurabang, the river that settler society calls the Hawkesbury and the Nepean. As a university student, he was a member of Student Action for Aborigines and took part in the 1965 bus trip, which has been memorialised as the Freedom Ride, including follow-up trips to Walgett and Bowraville in 196566. He worked as a teacher and as an Aboriginal Education Consultant at a regional and state level. Living in the Hawkesbury, he is well-equipped to write on the Hawkesbury's Frontier War.
