Reading list

Few Australians realise the extent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in the military. Using compelling personal narratives and rigorous archival research, Defending Country explores how military service impacted the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recruits. It also reveals how their involvement in Australia’s defence contributed to the advancement of Indigenous rights.

1838 and the British Empire is expanding relentlessly. On a remote cattle station on the frontier of the young New South Wales colony a lonely convict hut keeper is forced to confront the power and greed which drives that expansion. One of the convict stockmen on the station invites a group of Aborigines to the station with the promise of protection from the bands of marauding troopers and stockmen who roam the countryside. The station's convicts and their overseer develop close relationships with the Aborigines but the threat of violence is never far away. All must ultimately face some terrible choices - choices which reverberate across the colony and leave the young hut keeper struggling to find the courage to stand against powerful oppressors. The story behind 'Demons at Dusk' is true. It is a story of love and courage, betrayal and tragedy, mystery and deceit and the strength of the human spirit.

Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko tells two extraordinary stories set five generations apart. Torches Queensland’s colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future.

The Eumeralla Wars were the violent encounters over the possession of land between British colonists and Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in what is now called the Western District area of south west Victoria.

The policing of Aboriginal people changed from protection under law to punishment and control. The subsequent violence of colonial settlement and the associated policing and criminal justice system that developed, often of questionable legality, was what Royal Commissioner Roth in 1905 termed a ‘brutal and outrageous state of affairs’.

This updated edition charts the journey of this nation-building reform from the earliest stages of Indigenous advocacy, explores myths and misconceptions and, importantly, explains how the Voice offers change that will benefit the whole nation.

History of race relations between settlers and Indigenous people; book not intended to be a history of violence on the South Australian frontier but rather 'an exploration of the ways in which the violence has been remembered'.

Challenges the myth about the fate of Tasmania’s Indigenous people, vividly describing the extent of their resistance to colonisation, discussing the terms of the peace agreement under which they called themselves the ‘free Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land’, and arguing that they weren’t defeated—but betrayed.

Australia was not peacefully settled; it was taken by force through strategic, political and military campaigns. The early colony was militarised to protect it from foreign attacks, to maintain civil order over the convict population, and to suppress Aboriginal resistance against colonial interests. Defining the decades of armed, violent conflicts between sovereign First Nations and the colonists as “wars”, is often contested. However, the historical records from this period included this specific term to describe events on the frontier. The ongoing refusal to recognise this history of First Nations warriors and their adversaries denies them the memory, and the respect, they deserve.

Rob Collins describes Indigenous inventions (SBS/NITV, four episodes, June-July 2023)

How Indigenous law has enabled people to survive and thrive in Australia for more than 2000 generations. The sixth in a series on First Knowledges; others cover songlines, architecture, design, land management, botany, and astronomy.

Collection of resources giving a view of Australia’s First Peoples, including stories about their treatment in the past and about their aspirations and demands today. Particularly focusses on the Frontier Wars and the related issue of the involvement of Indigenous Australians in our defence forces.