Rachel Perkins and Henry Reynolds in The Australian on The Australian Wars

Pdf from our subscription. The original article includes illustrations and a link to a video with Perkins and Reynolds talking about the book. There are comments from readers. The extract is based on Perkins' Introduction to The Australian Wars, edited by her, Henry Reynolds, Stephen Gapps and Mina Murray, and published by Allen & Unwin.

More about the book, to be published early in November. Link to Table of Contents.

Some key points from Perkins' article:

[A]s the historian Henry Reynolds has explained ... the battles on the frontier should be recognised as war not because of how they were fought, but because of what they were fought about; a way of life and the sovereignty of a whole continent. Indeed, they were the wars that established modern Australia, hence the name “The Australian Wars” ...

My family’s Country is locked up in a cattle station we have no access to. Every time I drive past, I am reminded of the legacy of the warfare that happened in Central Australia. This is the experience of our people. But we have never passively accepted the outcome. It is what Marcia Langton calls our “burning desire for justice”...

[A trip to the Australian War Memorial as a child] affected me in the way a war memorial should, imbuing me with a deep fear of war and its unimaginable grief. But our stories from the period known as “the killing times”, like the massacre of my great grandmother’s family – none of that was part of my formal education ..

For most Aboriginal people who died during the Australian Wars, their bodies will never be located – which was deliberate. The usual approach was to dismember the bodies, then burn the parts in bonfires and finally, scatter to the wind the tiny particles of bones that remained to eradicate the evidence.

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Picture credit: detail of cover of The Australian Wars.

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