Cirrus@Austlit

'Within just a few weeks of the release of a biography of the Tasmanian leader Tongerlongeter, another biography of a remarkable Tasmanian has been published. Tongerlongeter was an Oyster Bay leader born before the arrival of the British and committed to the traditional way of life. His younger countryman, Kikatapula, was equally as astute and talented but torn between cultures. Up to his late teens Kikatapula lived traditionally as a member of the Paytirami people of Oyster Bay nation. As European incursions on Oyster Bay country increased, Kikatapula left to live with “the tame mob” in Hobart where he soon became unwell. Baptised as Tom Birch, he then lived and worked for three formative years for Sarah Birch in Hobart and on her husband's farm, “Duck-Hole”. Living with one of the most prosperous families in Hobart, Kikatapula was taught to read, write and speak English well, an attribute subsequently misrepresented in colonial literature. The highly educated young Aboriginal man lived among a resentful convict workforce. In 1822 when the NSW exile Musquito camped on an adjoining farm, Kikatapula left to join him and other Oyster Bay people to resist the invasion that was destroying their people, culture and country.' (Introduction)

Tongerlongeter was surely one of Australia’s toughest military leaders. Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements expressly narrate his story to affirm the place of the Frontier Wars in the Anzac pantheon. Reflexive conservative responses to such arguments – that Anzac Day commemorates only those who served in the Australian military – are flawed and outdated. The Tasmanian frontier is one of Australia’s best-documented cases of violent operations against Aboriginal people. In 1828, Governor George Arthur, unable to gain control over the ‘lamentable and protracted warfare’, issued a Demarcation Proclamation later enforced by the formation of Black Lines, military cordons stretching several hundred kilometres across southern and central Tasmania to secure the grasslands demanded by white settlers. Despite the efforts of Australia’s culture war protagonists led by Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant magazine, Tasmania’s Black Lines remain infamous in Australian history, with revisionist work emphasising the military planning, enormous cost, and extensive civilian involvement owing to Arthur’s declaration of a levée en masse, a form of conscription, to support the military operations. Comprising more than 2,200 soldiers and settlers, these army cordons remained ‘the largest domestic military offensive ever mounted on Australian soil’. Despite the forces arrayed against him, Tongerlongeter and his compatriots passed through the Black Lines with comparative ease in 1830. (Introduction)

'This is a book that practicing historians are sure to enjoy and that all writers of biography should read. Its twelve chapters cover the practice of autobiography, biographical introductions to Australian and Canadian “national” historians and to Australian female historians; it also includes research on the personal networks that bound the history departments of Australian universities up to the 1980s, those of American female historians in the interwar years, and the origins of that great national resource, the Australian Dictionary of Biography. There are also two chapters on British historians that offer insights into the intellectual histories of their eras, although Raphael Samuel's great contribution was to educational practice through the influential History Workshop Journal. If this seems a strange combination it is a product of the book's origins in an Australian National University workshop in 2015 which resulted in participants then contributing their papers to this edited collection.'  (Introduction)

'In the 1840s, white settlement in the north was under attack. European settlers were in awe of Aboriginal physical fitness and fighting prowess, and a series of deadly raids on homesteads made even the townspeople of Brisbane anxious.

'Young warrior Dundalli was renowned for his size and strength, and his elders gave him the task of leading the resistance against the Europeans' ever increasing incursions on their traditional lands. Their response was embedded in Aboriginal law and Dundalli became one of their greatest lawmen. With his band of warriors, he had the settlers in thrall for twelve years, evading capture again and again, until he was finally arrested and publicly executed.

'Warrior is the extraordinary story of one of Australia's little-known heroes, one of many Aboriginal men to die protecting their country. It is also a fresh and compelling portrait of life in the early days of white settlement of Brisbane and south east Queensland.' (Source Publisher's website)