The Vandemonian War was fundamentally a war between the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and those Tribespeople who lived in political and social contradiction to that colony. Brodie exposes the largely untold story of how the British truly occupied Van Diemen’s Land deploying regimental soldiers and special forces, armed convicts and mercenaries. This was a war of sweeping campaigns and brutal tactics, waged by military and paramilitary forces subject to a Lieutenant Governor who was also Colonel Commanding.

Henry Reynolds was led into the lives of remarkable and largely forgotten white humanitarians who followed their consciences and challenged the prevailing attitudes to Indigenous people… His now-classic 1998 book The Whispering in Our Hearts constructed an alternative history of Australia through the eyes of those who felt disquiet and disgust at the brutality of dispossession.

Tongerlongeter is an epic story of resistance, sorrow and survival. Leader of the Oyster Bay nation of south-east Tasmania in the 1820s and ’30s, Tongerlongeter and his allies prosecuted the most effective frontier resistance ever mounted on Australian soil, inflicting some 354 casualties. His brilliant campaign inspired terror throughout the colony, forcing Governor George Arthur to counter with a massive military operation in 1830. 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, Tongerlongeter united remnant tribes and became the settlement’s ‘King’ — a beacon of hope in a hopeless situation.

Henry Reynolds pulls the rug from under legal and historical assumptions in a book that’s about the present as much as the past. Truth-Telling 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.

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.

The contact history and political background to race relations in early colonial New South Wales; Kamilaroi territorial groupings, traditional subsistence social organisation, religion and language; pastoral expansion, government policy and attitudes toward Aborigines; violent conflict and the legal and political response; Waterloo Creek, Slaughterhouse Creek, Gravesend and Myall Creek massacres; subsequent inquiries; establishment of the Australian Aborigines Protection Society and Aboriginal Protectorate.