Emeritus Professor Henry Reynolds is the doyen of studies of the Australian Wars (see his titles in our Reading List or use our Search engine). Most recently, he is the co-editor of and a major contributor to the book, The Australian Wars.
Reynolds' Looking from the North: Australian History from the Top Down (NewSouth), is a concise general history of Australia above the Tropic of Capricorn, drawing upon Reynolds' more than 30 years there as a resident and university teacher. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory get far more coverage in this book than in other general histories of our Wide Brown Land.
Reviews by Judith Brett (The Saturday Paper), Raymond Evans (The Conversation), and Mark McKenna (Australian Book Review) have already appeared and others will doubtless follow. The book has been shortlisted in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2026, Non-Fiction.
Defending Country's special interest lies in how Reynolds depicts the Australian Wars. At pages 83-84, he summarises familiar arguments that these wars were not actually wars. 'Scattered skirmishing' was not serious enough and 'lacked the gravity, and even the nobility, of Australia's overseas wars. Consequently, frontier conflict didn't warrant memorials or boards of honour. No public official was ever recorded as using the sacred phrase "Lest We Forget" in relation to "fallen" Indigenous warriors.'
In his previous writings, Reynolds had knocked down both the arguments about skirmishes as non-warfare and those that applied to large-scale killing. If the latter was not warfare, was it extra-judicial killing, was it 'murder on a vast scale for which perpetrators were never brought to justice'? A more fundamental question, one that Reynolds does not address directly: however First Nations deaths are characterised, how do Australians today come to terms with this foundation stone of our nation?
Then at page 134, Reynolds says this on the contribution of Japanese pearl divers and South Sea Islanders to the North and to Australia. His remark comes at that foundation question from a different angle:
The Pacific Island labourers can be usefully compared with the Japanese pearl divers. In both cases, young men left their homes to travel to a foreign land in hope of returning with better prospects gained as a result of hard and often dangerous work in a society that barely tolerated them, and by and large looked down on them as inferior. Their contribution to Australian society has rarely been acknowledged and yet they did more of lasting significance than the young colonial men who also travelled far away to fight in Britain's wars and whose sacrifice we are endlessly told never to forget.
That point about two streams of our multicultural society can be extended. When we go back into our history of expeditionary forces and claim, as Dr Brendan Nelson used to, that they died 'for us', we are making assertions about mostly White soldiers back to 1901 and even earlier. Reynolds wants us to think instead about the peace-supporting and nation-building contributions of Pacific Islanders and Japanese. We could think also about the benefits flowing to Australia from Chinese Australians, Indian and Pakistani Australians, Jewish Australians, Palestinian Australians, and many others. Food for thought indeed.
Reynolds has chapters on the opening up of North Queensland, Black pioneers, Black police, Chinese and other diasporas, Darwin, Thursday Island, the attempts to preserve the North for the White man by deporting and excluding non-Whites, the role of Pacific Islanders, the ultimate death of White Australia, and more. These chapters are essential context for Australian Wars commemoration: the diverse history they disclose makes even more ludicrous than it already was our Anzac obsession with the deeds and deaths of White soldiers sent overseas up to almost two centuries ago.
There is another important point, and it is about the effects on First Nations people:
By the 1920s [says reviewer Raymond Evans] an original, pre-contact First Nations population of around 400,000 across the entire North (with perhaps 300,000 in Queensland) had been reduced by over 90% to around 40,000 people (with around 17,000 remaining in Queensland). These had been replaced by almost 500,000 migrant incomers. Yet most of the sequestered lands were now in the hands of only 1500 or so pastoral families, partnerships and absentee companies.
Can our overseas military adventures match that for impact on Australia and Australlians?
Henry Reynolds is one of Defending Country's distinguished Patrons.
Picture credit: book cover (detail)
