Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country

Convincing Ground is a wide-ranging, personal, and powerful work which resonates with historical and contemporary Australian debates about identity, dispossession, memory, and community. This study covers their national contemporary political stage, critiquing the great Australian silence when it comes to dealing respectfully with the construction of the nation's Indigenous past. The book examines early colonial behavior on Gunditchmurra lands (near Portland, Victoria) and the shaping of Australians, then and now, physically and intellectually. Through a close, critical examination of the major historical works and witness accounts, Convincing Ground draws uncanny parallels between the techniques, language, and results of the invasion to contemporary times. For the author, Bruce Pascoe, the Australian character was not forged at Gallipoli, Eureka, and the back of Bourke, but in the more satanic furnace of Australias Murdering Flat, Convincing Ground, and Werribee. Pascoe knows the pas