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The Bond Store tales

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The Bond Store tales

by Ross Gibson

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Accession 9780949753618 ISBN 9780949753618 Publisher Museum of Sydney

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on_shelf: True
position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:12
orientation: vertical

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binding_type: Hard Back
dimensions: none captured
spine_text: MOS MUSEUM OF SYDNEY THE BOND STORE TALES Ross Gibson H

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Topics and Themes

1. **Colonial History & the Founding of Sydney**
The book is rooted in the everyday lives of colonial Sydney from 1788 to 1850, drawing on historical records and fragments to reconstruct the texture of life in a young, raw settlement. It engages with questions of how a colony forms its identity, its institutions, and its social order.

Connect to books about: Australian colonial history, convict settlements, the founding of New South Wales, early Sydney society.

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2. **History & Fiction / Creative Non-Fiction**
The book blends historical fragments with storytelling so that fiction emerges from documentary evidence — stories are grounded in material records yet shaped by narrative imagination. This places it within a tradition of creative non-fiction and narrative history.

Connect to books about: creative non-fiction, historical fiction, narrative history, historiography, the "true story" and its limits.

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3. **Maritime History & Seafaring Culture**
The book is explicitly described as "mariner tales of Sydney's Pacific waterworld," centred on seafarers, their voyages, and the culture of life at sea. The ocean itself is a protagonist — dangerous, connecting, and shaping identity.

Connect to books about: maritime history, seafaring life, the age of sail, the Pacific Ocean, whaling and trade voyages.

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4. **The Pacific World & Cross-Cultural Encounter**
The stories unfold across the broader Pacific, engaging with the moral economy of 19th-century Pacific trade and the encounters — sometimes violent, sometimes curious — between Europeans, Indigenous peoples, and other Pacific communities.

Connect to books about: Pacific history, cross-cultural contact, colonialism in Oceania, trade networks, exploration.

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5. **Place, Memory & Museum Culture**
The book was produced alongside the Museum of Sydney and directly complements the Bond Store as a physical storytelling space. It explores how places accumulate memory and how institutions like museums recover and interpret the past.

Connect to books about: public history, museum studies, heritage and place, memory studies, urban history.

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6. **Everyday Life & Ordinary People in History**
Rather than focusing on governors and generals, the book attends to ordinary people — sailors, traders, and settlers — recovering their stories from the margins of official records. Research notes at the end of each story honour these individuals by name.

Connect to books about: social history, microhistory, history from below, subaltern studies, biographical history.

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7. **Aboriginal Australia & Colonial Encounter**
The book's index references Aboriginal figures such as Bungaree, situating Indigenous Australians within colonial Sydney's story and acknowledging the collision of cultures at the frontier of settlement.

Connect to books about: Aboriginal Australian history, frontier conflict, Indigenous–settler relations, colonial violence, First Nations perspectives.

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8. **Trade, Commerce & the Moral Economy**
The book engages with the "moral economy" of 19th-century Pacific trade — the ethics, customs, and power dynamics embedded in commercial exchange between colonies, ships, and Pacific communities.

Connect to books about: economic history, merchant capitalism, trade and empire, the ethics of commerce, commodity culture.

The Bond Store tales

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