2026 Annual Lecture with Emeritus Professor Grace Karskens

Remembering Ballandella: re-reading the archive

Ballandella was four years old when Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell took her from her mother Turandurey at the end of his expedition to Australia Felix in 1836. Turandurey, a Yitha Yitha woman from the Lachlan River, was one of several Aboriginal guides who made that expedition possible.  As far as we know, she never saw Ballandella again.

Mitchell’s account, published in 1838, claimed that Turandurey asked him to take her daughter. He wrote that his own family in Sydney welcomed Ballandella and that he educated her.  Over the next 150 years, this benign story became the standard account, with writers and journalists adding increasingly romantic details as the decades passed.  Then in the 1980s, another account of the expedition was rediscovered and published. The journal of surveyor Granville Stapylton, the expedition’s second-in-charge, contains a very different account of Ballandella’s fate: she was ‘kidnapped away’. 

How do historians explore and make sense of contradictory accounts like this? Was Ballandella willingly surrendered, or was she a stolen child? Those loyal to Mitchell defend him, those who champion Stapylton condemn Mitchell. But by placing Turandurey and Ballandella at the centre of this history, by ground-truthing and following their stories, a detailed, contextualised re-reading of this archive is possible, and suggests a more truthful scenario.

This event will open with an Acknowledgement of Country delivered by Ngunnawal Elder Dr Aunty Caroline Hughes AM.

About the speaker

Grace Karskens is Emeritus Professor of Australian History at the University of New South Wales. She is a leading authority on early colonial Australia and cross-cultural history. Grace's books and articles have shifted the shape of Australian colonial and cross-cultural history and reached national and international audiences. Her books include the award-winning The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (1996) and The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009), which won the 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Grace's latest book People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia (2020) won the 2021 Prime Minister's Award for Australian History. Since then she has worked with Darug researchers on a collaborative project, Dyarubbin: The Real Secret River, funded by the State Library of New South Wales' Coral Thomas Fellowship.

We look forward to welcoming you to this special event as ANU Archives explores how re-reading the archival record can recover and reframe Aboriginal lives and histories.