Overview of the reaction of government authorities to Aborigines in the Northern Territory during the period 1863 to 1910, when the Territory was controlled by South Australia; what policy development there was is set in the context of how the government and white settlers viewed Aborigines; influence of social Darwinism on policy and attitudes; contact history and violent conflict on the frontier as Europeans attempted to realise the economic promises made by government; use of Aboriginal labour, policies on education and welfare.

Covers First Nations battles in the first decade or so of the Sydney settlement, around Bathurst, at Pinjarra, WA, and at Battle Mountain, Queensland, as well as Vinegar Hill (convict uprising, 1804) and the Eureka Stockade (1854), their inclusion explained by the sub-title of the book in some printings: 'the black resistance to invasion and the white struggle against colonial oppression'. 'Generations of Australians have been taught that no wars have ever been fought on Australian soil. Yet as many as 20,000 black Australians died fighting a war of resistance that lasted for more than a century. Six Australian Battlefields presents an alternative view of history. Through detailed accounts of four great clashes, it confronts the reader with the realities of life on the Australian frontier. And through a retelling of the stories of Vinegar Hill and Eureka it reminds the reader of the central place of resistance in our past.'

The first people thrived on the New England Tableland since the first sunrise. But in the 1830s, squatters began invading the region with their plagues of livestock. Colonisation plunged Aboriginal society into utter chaos, driving us off our lands and decimating the traditional way of life. Our people's remarkable history of resistance and survival has faded into obscurity. It is their story which this book sets out to reclaim, co-opting the colonial archive and subverting the colonial narrative, deconstructing their story in order to uncover our own.

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.