Reading list

Authors are Peter FitzSimons (long description of events, drawing upon previous authors), SMH editorial writer, Jordan Baker (First Nations view), Mark Tedeschi (the work of Justice Plunkett), Brooke Boney (descendant), Lyndall Ryan (massacre mapping project), Linda Burney (Minister). The SMH notes how the paper at the time added to the rancid atmosphere around the massacre. Illustration credit (Wikimedia Commons): ReColouration of Myall Creek Massacre scene from 177 year old lithograph - "Australian Aborigines Slaughtered by Convicts, by Phiz, The Book of Remarkable Trials, 1840; Chronicles of Crime V. II, 1841." for a Gamilaraay Surviving Descendants community education project. (Creative Commons)

The story of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania … Far from disappearing, the Tasmanian Aborigines actively resisted settler colonialism from the outset and have consistently campaigned for their rights and recognition as a distinct people through to the present.

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.