Twenty chapters making the case that Australia is more than Anzac - and always has been. Includes Eualeyai-Kamillaroi historian Larissa Behrendt on ‘Settlement or invasion? The coloniser’s quandary’ and journalist and author Paul Daley on ‘Our most important war: The legacy of frontier conflict’

Fictionalised account of punitive expeditions against Walbiri people led by Constable W.G. Murray and Nugget Morton; criticism of the affair by missionary Athol McGregor and Anne Locke; Darwin trial; recent interviews with Walbiri survivors by M. Hartwig, P. Read and P. Wafer.

Benjamin Duterrau and his National picture project are at the core of this publication because he was the colonial artist most interested in Tasmania's Aboriginal people, and the only artist who chose to depict, on a substantial scale, their conciliation or pacification by George Augustus Robinson. Tasmanian officials tried to use paintings to show to Aboriginal people 'the cause of the present warfare' and the 'real wishes of the government': 'the desired termination of hostility'.

Tells the story of Australian Aboriginal history and society from its distant beginnings to the present day. From the wisdom and paintings of the Dreamtime to the first contact between Europeans and Indigenous Australians, through to the Uluru Statement, it offers an insight into the life and experiences of the world's oldest surviving culture. The resilience and adaptability of Aboriginal people over millennia is one of the great human stories of all time.

Drawing from documentary and oral evidence, the book describes the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans. Henry Reynolds' argument that the Aborigines resisted fiercely was highly original when it was first published (1981) and is no less challenging today.

The race on the fringe of the continent has been there about a hundred years, and stands for Civilization; the race in the interior has been there no man knows how long, and stands for Barbarism. Between them a woman has lived in a little white tent for more than twenty years, watching over these people for the sake of the Flag, a woman alone, the solitary spectator of a vanishing race. She is Daisy Bates, one of the least known and one of the most romantic figures in the British Empire. (from the blurb to the 1944 edition)