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In 1788, when the first convict fleet arrived at Botany Bay to establish an English penal colony near what became Sydney, New South Wales, there were somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 Aborigines living in the area. Within two years, however, half the Aboriginal population had died from the effects of smallpox and other European diseases, and by 1840, only 300 individuals remained. Certain English governors, officials, and missionaries attempted to help the Aborigines, but their solution was to educate and Christianize them, a "civilizing" process that sometimes involved the forcible removal of young black children from their families to live at special mission schools. This is the history of one such native institution and the "black town" that grew up around it at Parramatta. The book contains a great deal of information on missionary activity and is especially interesting for the light it sheds on the life of the well-known Reverend Samuel Marsden of the Christian Missionary Society. The Parramatta Institution was a dismal failure; Aboriginal tradition and European intolerance proved too formidable. Well written, well documented, with illustrations, and maps, this book is a valuable addition to any collection dealing with race relations in colonial Austrialia or the 19th-century British Empire generally. All levels.-W. W. Reinhardt, Randolph-Macon College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
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