Surveying the Wild Abyss: Unravelling settler memory

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 and 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 asks non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians to reflect on their history, and reinvents the way Australian history is written.

About the author

Barry Corr 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 1965–66. 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.

Barry Corr
Published July 2026
Paperback
464 pages 
234mm x 153mm
ISBN 9781761170423