The sepia-toned photograph on the front cover of historian Richard Broome’s new book presents the reader with two young indigenous Australian boys, taken around 1900 at Ramahyuck, an ‘Aboriginal mission’. Bright-eyed, alert and pleased with themselves in white shirts, woollen vests, jackets and trousers, they appear to be wearing possum or kangaroo skin cloaks. A closer look, however, reveals that the furs draped thickly around their shoulders are not iconic cloaks, but their successful catch of tasty rabbits.

Broome, an experienced researcher and teacher, has provided a detailed study of the experience of ‘Aboriginal Victorians’. While Aboriginal history writers of recent decades have adopted either the grand scale of nation or the intimate scale of family and community, Broome has instead focused on the regions/colony/state of ‘Victoria’. Traversing an encyclopedic set of facts and detail of chronological and regional variety, this book is written in the empirical, synthetic style of the ‘general history’. Broome’s bird’s-eye view of time passing inevitably fosters a master narrative. Yet by regularly citing other historians, Broome circumvents the all-knowing effect of the general history’s authorial voice. Occasionally, he will also disagree with them. To balance the accounts, he presents indigenous historical interpretations, though these narrators are less likely to be named. In the telling of this vast Victorian history, however, Broome does name, and provide brief stories about, many indigenous individuals and their families. In aiming to reclaim their rightful place in the state’s history, he has not heeded the oft-heard cries for confidentiality.