Reading list

Tells the history of military engagements between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians—described as ‘this constant sort of war’ by one early colonist—around the greater Sydney region from the arrival of a British expedition in 1788 to the last recorded conflict in the area in 1817.

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.

In late 2023, Australians will have their say in a referendum about whether to change the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Contains key documents and resources, latest news.

By Indigenous leader Thomas Mayo and acclaimed journalist Kerry O’Brien, this is a clear, concise and simple guide for the millions of Australians who have expressed support for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, but who want to better understand what a Voice to Parliament actually means.

The chapters cover precolonial and post-colonial history, language, kinship, knowledge, art, performance, storytelling, native title, the Stolen Generations, making a rightful place for First Australians and looking to the future for Indigenous Australia. A new introduction as well as a chapter on racism has been written especially for this handbook, and all information has been checked and updated.

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.

The need for a Voice has its roots in what anthropologist WEH Stanner in the late 1960s called the ‘Great Australian Silence’, whereby the history and culture of Indigenous Australians have been largely ignored by the wider society. This ‘forgetting’ has not been incidental but rather an intentional, initially colonial policy of erasement. So have times now changed? Is the tragedy of that national silence—a refusal to acknowledge Indigenous agency and cultural achievements—finally coming to an end?

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.

A startling reassessment of the Aborigines in early Australia. Rather than being prisoners in a hostile continent, the Aborigines were a successful race - triumphant in their discovery of the land, triumphant in their adaptation to it, and in their mastery of its contrasting climates, seasons and resources.

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.

Links to many books from UQP, fiction and non-fiction, on First Nations topics and by First Nations authors

Under headings Voice Referendum, Justice, Politics, Country and others