Australie

1880 · réf. 19039 — Adelaide: E Spiller 1880. First Edition. Contemporary full green morocco. Very good. 8vo xi 3 3 - 139 1 pp. 6 full page plates in text. Christina Smith nee Menzies 1809-1893 was the first white woman to settle in the district of Rivoli Bay South Australia in 1845. She established a home for Aborigines in Mt Gambier in 1865. She was a teacher and missionary known for her support of Aborigines in particular the Booandik Buandig or Buandik people whose numbers were diminishing due to European aggression disease and land depredation. In 1864 under her married name Mrs Smith she published as a pamphlet Memoir of Wergon an Australian Aborigine of the Reedy Creek tribe South Australia born in 1836; died in 1850. In 1865 she profiled a Booandik woman known as Mingboaram or Caroline in a 31-page pamphlet titled Caroline and her family or The Conversion of Black Bobby. It tells how the woman who is aware she is dying asked Mrs Smith to care for her two young children.At the request of the Booandik people Smith recorded in detail their customs legends and social relationships while her son Duncan compiled a Booandik vocabulary. In 1880 under the pen name Mrs James Smith she wrote The Booandik Tribe of South Australian Aborigines: A Sketch of Their Habits Customs Legends and Language. It is an account of their rites of passage songs and language with brief biographies of fourteen christian converts. The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes it as ‘an influential ethnography blending scholarly observation with personal narrative it was a unique window onto an Aboriginal-settler frontier.’ Smith wrote in the foreword that she lamented the loss of this once large and powerful tribe as a result of cruel practices of the early settlers of the colony and considered it her duty to record Booandik characteristics customs habits language and legends for future historians antiquarians and philologists. Ferguson #15823. E Spiller unknown books