I stood there as that White Man. As part of the colonial influx which created and then sustained the aftermath of that particular story.
Above: Under a matching sky, looking southwest across the Phillips River scrub plain toward the homestead at Cocanarup. This is the primary site of the South Coast’s late -1800’s Aboriginal massacres. Image: Cellphone camera capture, 11.30 a.m. Sunday, 18th September, 2022. Source: Ciaran Lynch Private Collection
The first post on The View From Mount Clarence blog was dated 27 March, 2014. In it I set out my motivations and intentions. I wanted to be certain about Indigenous history in the place I grew up. There were important people in my early life who I never got to know properly, and at the time of writing (because I was living in Dublin, Ireland) there seemed small chance I was going to reconnect again.
There were other reasons too. Often, people are compelled to do things by forces they don’t necessarily understand. Or find hard to articulate. They just go about doing what they have learned to do; daily, monthly, yearly. I guess, however, if you choose writing as a means of addressing those driving forces it is likely somewhere along the line you are going to set something down that comes close to explaining them.