Reading list

Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact. Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy. In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia’s story can best be told.

Written and illustrated by over 150 First Nations children and published by the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council. Chapter headings: Dreaming, Old Time, The Macassans, The Whitefellas, Today, My Country.

A comprehensive military history of frontier conflict in Australia. Covering the first 50 years of British occupation, it examines in detail how both sides fought on the frontier and how Aborigines developed a form of warfare differing from tradition.

Rachel Perkins journeys across the country to explore the bloody battles fought on Australian soil and the war that established the Australian nation, seeking to change the narrative of the nation.

In 1840, Brisbane was the furthest outpost of settled Australia. Over the next few years, pastoralists poured in. The violence that erupted welded many of the tribal groups into an alliance that, by 1842, was working to halt the advance. The Battle of One Tree Hill tells the story of one of the most audacious stands against this migration.

Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised, with an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire, the life cycles of native plants, and the natural flow of water to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year.

Between 1825 and 1831 close to 200 Britons and 1000 Aborigines died violently in Tasmania's Black War. It was by far the most intense frontier conflict in Australia's history, yet many Australians know little about it. This book takes a unique approach to this historic event, looking chiefly at the experiences and attitudes of those who took part.

Regularly features articles relevant to First Nations history, the Voice and Frontier Wars

Tells the story of Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu, with interviews with the author and others (ABC TV 18 July 2023)

The four-part series uncovers traditional knowledge and insights, which could help navigate some of the biggest challenges of our time, celebrating and exploring the world’s longest surviving culture—that of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The story of how entire landscapes were transformed, how events predating written history were recorded as far back as the last ice age, how people navigated over extraordinary distances, and how whole societies were organised.

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.