Cirrus@Austlit

'THE 1850S BROUGHT dramatic changes to the Australian colonies – the gold rushes, the end of convict transportation in the eastern colonies, the granting of internal self-government through New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania in 1856. Queensland followed in their wake and detached from NSW in June 1859. Its inaugural elections were held in April the following year and the parliament sat for its first session on 22 May 1860. From the very start the colony’s novice politicians were confronted with the problem of dealing with fierce resistance from the First Nations across a vast frontier.' (Introduction)

'In his latest publication, Henry Reynolds surveys international laws that challenge the audacious claim the British made on the Australian continent in the eighteenth century. In his trademark enigmatic style, Reynolds draws our attention to two significant sections of Uluru Statement from the Heart authored at the National Constitutional Convention held at Uluru in 2017, which calls for a Makarrata (Yolgnu – coming together after a struggle). The first declares that First Nations peoples never ‘ceded or extinguished’ sovereignty over their land and secondly this sovereignty ‘coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown’ (viii–ix). The book’s timely arrival amidst increasing demands for truth-telling about Australia’s colonial past strikes a decisive blow to long-held assumptions about the basis on which European sovereignty was established.'  (Introduction)

'The Uluru Statement from the Heart of May 2017 was addressed to the people of Australia from 250 delegates ‘coming from all points of the southern sky’. While clearly a political manifesto, it embodied significant assertions about both history and law, declaring that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the ‘first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs’. This sovereignty, the statement continued, ‘has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown’. How could it be otherwise, the delegates asked, ‘that peoples possessed a land for 60 millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?’'  (Introduction)

'An epic story of resistance, suffering and survival. Tongerlongeter resurrects a once-in-a-generation leader all Australians can admire.

'Australia has no war hero more impressive than Tongerlongeter. Leader of the Oyster Bay nation of south-east Tasmania in the 1820s and ’30s, he and his allies led the most effective frontier resistance ever mounted on Australian soil. They killed or wounded some 354 – or 4 per cent – of the invaders of their country. Tongerlongeter’s brilliant campaign inspired terror throughout the colony, forcing Governor George Arthur to launch a massive military operation in 1830 – the infamous Black Line. Tongerlongeter escaped but the cumulative losses had taken their toll. On New Year’s Eve 1831, having lost his arm, his country, and all but 25 of his people, the chief agreed to an armistice. In exile on Flinders Island, this revered warrior united most of the remnant tribes and became the settlement’s ‘King’ – a beacon of hope in a hopeless situation.' (Publication summary)

'If we are to take seriously the need for telling the truth about our history, we must start at first principles.

'What if the sovereignty of the First Nations was recognised by European international law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What if the audacious British annexation of a whole continent was not seen as acceptable at the time and the colonial office in Britain understood that 'peaceful settlement' was a fiction? If the 1901 parliament did not have control of the whole continent, particularly the North, by what right could the new nation claim it?

'The historical record shows that the argument of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is stronger than many people imagine and the centuries-long legal position about British claims to the land far less imposing than it appears.

'In Truth-Telling, influential historian Henry Reynolds pulls the rug from legal and historical assumptions, with his usual sharp eye and rigour, in a book that's about the present as much as the past. His work shows exactly why our national war memorial must acknowledge the frontier wars, why we must change the date of our national day, and why treaties are important. Most of all, it makes urgently clear that the Uluru Statement is no rhetorical flourish but carries the weight of history and law and gives us a map for the future.' (Publication summary)

'US slave owners wrote and spoke about liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Similar hypocrisy, buried in the foundations of settler Australia, has escaped comparable scrutiny.' (Introduction)

'Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. Why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists? Why is it more controversial to talk about the frontier war now than it was one hundred years ago?'

'Forgotten War continues the story told in Henry Reynolds seminal book The Other Side of the Frontier, which argued that the settlement of Australia had a high level of violence and conflict that we chose to ignore.'

'That book prompted a flowering of research and fieldwork that Reynolds draws on here to give a thorough and systematic account of what caused the frontier wars between white colonists and Aborigines, how many people died and whether the colonists themselves saw frontier conflict as a form of warfare.' (Source: Creative Spirits website)

'The looming centenary of the landing at Gallipoli is a reminder of unfinished business between settler and Indigenous Australia after a decade of incomplete reconciliation'

'[This] is a pioneering account of the transnational production of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A work remarkable both for its international breadth and for its sensitivity to local particularity, it is a model for the new global history.

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds expertly and imaginatively reconstruct how leading white intellectuals and politicians in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain fought demands for racial equality and jointly invented new doctrines of racial superiority to justify the maintenance and, in some cases, the reinvigoration of white privilege in every part of the world that Britain either controlled or in which it had once deposited its settlers.

A powerful and sobering history, incisively and elegantly told.' Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

'Set in central-western New South Wales in the 1890s, Fred Schepisi’s film of Thomas Keneally’s award-winning novel is a powerful and confronting story of a black man’s revenge against an unjust and intolerant society.

'Raised by missionaries, Jimmie Blacksmith, a young half-caste Aboriginal man, is poignantly caught between the ways of his black forefathers and those of the white society to which he aspires. Exploited by his boss and betrayed by his [white] wife, he declares war on his white employers and goes on a violent killing spree.

'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith was one of the most significant films of the 1970s ‘renaissance’. It was the first Australian feature in which the whole story is told from an Aboriginal perspective and it broke new ground in dealing with one of the most tragic aspects of Australian history: the racist treatment of the Aboriginal population. The spectre of the violent and vengeful black had barely been touched upon and the depth of rage that the film put on screen was unprecedented in Australian film at the time.' (Publication summary)

'In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry were commonly assumed to be morally and physically defective, unstable and degenerate. They bore the brunt of society's contempt, and the removal of their children created Australia's stolen generations. Nowhere People is a history of beliefs about people of mixed race, both in Australia and overseas. It explores the concept of racial purity, eugenics, and the threat posed by miscegenation.' (Publication summary)