Reading List category: 

First Nations History

First Nations History
The Honest History Book (2017)
Stephens, David and Alison Broinowski, ed.
Twenty chapters making the case that Australia is more than Anzac - and always has been. Includes Eualeyai-Kamillaroi historian Larissa Behrendt on ‘Settlement or invasion? The coloniser’s quandary’ and journalist and author Paul Daley on ‘Our most important war: The legacy of frontier conflict’
First Nations History
Indigenous Affairs: Government
The Leap (2025)
Paul Daley
Welcome to The Leap, an outback town fuelled by fear, churning with corruption, prejudice and misogyny – and blighted by its inescapable history of frontier violence. Into this nightmarish morass falters traumatised British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill. He’s on his first Australian mission, one seemingly straightforward enough – until he arrives in The Leap to battle a town conspiring against him. The Leap is baying for vengeance over the alleged murder of the celebrated daughter of a powerful local grazier. But Benedict is on an impossible quest for the opposite: mercy for the young woman’s two accused female killers. The townspeople will challenge and threaten him at every turn as he fights for justice, his future, his sanity – and ultimately his life.
First Nations History
Frontier Wars
The Original Australians: The Story of the Aboriginal People (2nd edition, 2019)
Flood, Josephine
Tells the story of Australian Aboriginal history and society from its distant beginnings to the present day. From the wisdom and paintings of the Dreamtime to the first contact between Europeans and Indigenous Australians, through to the Uluru Statement, it offers an insight into the life and experiences of the world's oldest surviving culture. The resilience and adaptability of Aboriginal people over millennia is one of the great human stories of all time.
Frontier Wars
First Nations History
The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981, 2006)
Reynolds, Henry
Drawing from documentary and oral evidence, the book describes the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans. Henry Reynolds' argument that the Aborigines resisted fiercely was highly original when it was first published (1981) and is no less challenging today.
First Nations History
The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia (1938 and later editions)
Bates, Daisy
The race on the fringe of the continent has been there about a hundred years, and stands for Civilization; the race in the interior has been there no man knows how long, and stands for Barbarism. Between them a woman has lived in a little white tent for more than twenty years, watching over these people for the sake of the Flag, a woman alone, the solitary spectator of a vanishing race. She is Daisy Bates, one of the least known and one of the most romantic figures in the British Empire. (from the blurb to the 1944 edition)
First Nations History
The Passion of Private White (2023)
Watson, Don
The story of a fifty-year relationship between a Vietnam veteran and an isolated clan in north-east Arnhem Land—a unique window into Australia’s deep past and precarious present, by one of our master storytellers.
The Passion of Private White describes the meeting of two worlds: that of the intensely driven anthropologist Neville White, and the world of hunter-gatherer clans in remote northern Australia with whom he has lived and worked for half a century, mapping their culture and history in breathtaking detail.