Henry Reynolds

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to such arguments – that Anzac Day commemorates only those who served in the Australian military – are flawed and outdated.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.

In the wake of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, truth-telling has gained new currency in Australia. The Statement called for a ‘Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’.  Although yet to be fleshed out in any detail, the renewed call for truth-telling has been greeted with enthusiasm by many First Nations peoples and their allies around the continent, who endorse the view that shining the bright light of truth into the darkest recesses of Australian history will contribute to a transformation in Indigenous–settler relations.

Making the sea passage south to Flinders Island, I began reading this while off-watch, hoping book and destination might augment, but tough weather cancelled free time until after a landfall sleep. I’ve not much enjoyed histories which cast these manuka and granite islands in dismal role, they are shockingly beautiful, but the crowded cemetery wails, the old lath church is empty of joyful song, and the rule of Commandant Jeanneret recalls similar miseries of bonded Malay and Bantamese on Cocos.

In 1885 the Singleton MHA and Militia officer Albert Gould reflected that, New South Wales having sent a contingent to fight for the empire in the Sudan, 'we shall be ...

Tasmania is a small place with a rich historiography. Two themes in particular have intrigued historians and novelists since the nineteenth century and have appealed to film-makers and artists in more recent times. The fate of the Aborigines and the convict system which dominated society from 1803 to 1853 ...

Henry Reynolds is the pre-eminent historian of Aboriginal–settler relations in Australia, and with this theme he begins his history of Tasmania. He eschews the obligatory set piece description of Aboriginal society before the Europeans arrived, with which so many books now awkwardly commence ...

This is an important book that should be read by as wide a range of historians as possible. Some will find it totally agreeable, others will find it very disagreeable, while others will agree with some parts of the book but not all. It is a book not just about the ‘militarisation of Australian history’, but, perhaps more importantly, about how Australians see themselves in the world.

The federal government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is, above all, an exercise of power. It illustrates for all to see that the government can interfere with the smallest details of domestic life in a blatantly discriminatory way, regardless of Australia’s international obligations and professed belief in racial equality. It declares to the world that adult Aborigines can be treated like children. Both the present and previous government would argue, in a time-honoured way, that it is for the communities’ own good.

Possibly inspired by the British Film Institute’s ‘Classics’ texts, the ‘Australian Screen Classics’ series is not only downright valuable but also looks good. The latest two, in their smart black covers, each adorned with a striking still from the relevant film, confirms the importance of having such detailed attention paid to key films in our history.

On the front of the only postcard my grandfather kept is a picture of the United States Navy’s ‘great white fleet’ off Australian shores. A Pennsylvanian uncle sent it to the nine-year-old boy in 1908, ‘from one white man to another’. After reading Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynolds’s important new book on the transnational assertion of white racial identity in the early twentieth century, I now know that our American relative was merely echoing Rear-Admiral Sperry, who, at a luncheon in Sydney the same year, greeted his Australian hosts as a ‘white man to white men, and I may add, very white men’.