History
Book Details

The Death of William Gooch

A History’s Anthropology

Greg Dening

Greg Dening uses the incident of the murder of William Gooch, the young astronomer on board the Daedalus, as the basis for a penetrating study of historical narrative and meaning.

Opinion

‘a Deningesque double helix of findings and speculation, past and present, subject and author’
Christina Thompson, The Age

About this Title

William Gooch died at Waimea on the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian chain. Pahupu, Hawaiian warriors ‘cut-in-two’ by their tattoos, killed him there. He was only twenty-two.

Gooch’s is a short life indeed on which to base a book. But Greg Dening uses the incident of his murder as the basis for a penetrating study of historical narrative and meaning.

Gooch, the young astronomer on board the Daedalus, is written into history through the perceptions and intentions of the historian. This is ‘history’s anthropology’. The layers of interpretation and meaning are woven into the fabric of the history itself. And this is the historian entwined in the fragments of the past that are sought, found, reworked and retold.

About the Author

Greg Dening, prize-winning author of Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. His education in anthropology, history, philosophy and theology has helped him to tell a fascinating tale of lost hopes and failed promise—an exploration into the subtle shades of historical enquiry.

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978-0-522-84692-8