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.

These were the words of delegates to the Uluru Dialogue meetings held around the country leading up to the First Nations Constitutional Convention at Uluru, May 2017, whose work was distilled into the Statement.

History of early contact based on documentary sources; traces changing attitudes of both Aborigines and whites and the increasingly devastating effects of settlement.