What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology attempts to showcase as many diverse voices, experiences, and stories as possible to answer that question. Each account reveals, to some degree, the impacts of invasion and colonisation.

Traces the co-ordinated resistance warfare by the Wiradyuri under the leadership of Windradyne, and others such as Blucher and Jingler, in a vast area across the central west of New South Wales. Detailing drastic counterattacks by colonists and punitive expeditions led by armed parties of colonists and convicts that often ended in massacres of Wiradyuri women and children.

Contact history based on Aboriginal oral accounts; prehistory, traditional culture and territorial groupings; Captain Cook mythology and contradictions of early settlement; case studies of killings; role of police and police trackers; destruction of Karangpurru and Nyiwanawu culture; Humbert River Mudbura Aboriginal Reserve; Aboriginal perception of social justice; wages and unionism; Vesteys and labour issues; effects of Welfare policies; station violence, interpersonal relations and sexual conflict; working lives on stations; demographic estimates; the Wave Hill strike (1966); and more.

Written as an introductory guidebook, it is broken into chapters covering organisation, strategies, weaponry, and defences. It considers both traditional practices and technological and tactical adaptations. To make this complex topic more accessible, How They Fought includes numerous tables, figures and diagrams that illustrate and summarise the contents.

In 1891 Mounted Constable William Willshire, the Officer in Charge of the Native Police, was arrested for the murder of two Aboriginal men. His career was centred in the Northern Territory (then administered by South Australia) during the 1880s and 1890s. Aboriginal resistance to European incursions upon their land was at its height, and it escalated the hardening of racial attitudes and national sentiment.

Noel Loos has concluded that the Aboriginal people in Queensland had been subject to a genocide, a holocaust different from that inflicted on the Jews in Europe, but equivalent to it.