Not much is known about the Aboriginal man known as “Musquito” (c.1780–1825). This does not make him unusual among the Aboriginal people who faced the first 40 years of British colonisation of eastern Australia. But in three respects, his life is noteworthy.

Review: Musquito: a real story of a legendary colonial warrior – Naomi Parry Duncan (Allen & Unwin)

One is that the French naturalist Nicolas-Martin Petit drew him in 1802 – the basis of an engraving by Barthélemy Roger published in France in 1807. (Both images are reproduced in this book.)

Another is that, although he was born in the Sydney region, Musquito, who the historian Naomi Parry Duncan describes as an early First Nations resistance fighter, lived for many years away from his Country. This means he is more connected to the story of Van Diemen’s Land than to what we know of New South Wales’ colonisation.

Third is Musquito’s place in the history of criminal law: a fledgling Hobart Supreme Court found him guilty of abetting murder. He was one of the first Aboriginal people to be hanged.

As she explains in some detail, Duncan is descended from colonists who occupied Musquito’s Country: now Sydney’s northwestern suburbs. A sense of obligation to Musquito and his kin has sustained her across two of decades of labour, assembling what little we can know.

Much of the book is lyrical: Duncan does not mask her own delight in “Country”. Her narrative – in both third and first person – is alive to the natural history of the places of Musquito’s “bright” and “multifaceted” life. She quietly celebrates what links her and her readers to the dispossessed: the material world of non-human creatures and cultivated landscapes that was Musquito’s is now hers.

Duncan subtly invites us to consider how dispossession enables sensuous inheritance, prolifically evoking her own inhabitation (actual and imagined) of the places Musquito trod.

Exiled to Norfolk Island

Duncan devotes many more pages to Musquito’s physical and social setting than to Musquito himself.

She also takes us back to the parts of England where her convict ancestors (with the surnames Mobbs, Grono and Bateman) committed the crimes that secured their passages to Port Jackson. They were part of the invasion of Country between Parramatta (Baramada) and Dyarubbin (the Hawkesbury–Nepean rivers).

She also devotes a........

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