Reading list

Here you will find a list of books, websites and other resources below dealing with the Australian Frontier Wars and First Nations. Our listings of Related sites and organisations and Latest news may also be useful.

Note that this list does not include articles in academic or similar journals. Many of the books listed, however, have comprehensive bibliographies, including articles.

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Frontier Wars
First Nations History
How They Fought: Indigenous Tactics and Weaponry of Australia’s Frontier Wars (2023)
Kerkhove, Ray
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.
Frontier Wars
South Australia
In the Name of the Law: William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier (2007)
Nettelbeck, Amanda and Robert Foster
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.
Frontier Wars
Queensland
In the Shadow of Holocausts: Australia and the Third Reich (2017)
Loos, Noel
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.
First Nations History
Independent Australia
Various authors
Regularly features articles relevant to First Nations history, the Voice and Frontier Wars
First Nations History
Inside Story
Various authors
Regularly features articles relevant to First Nations history, the Voice and Frontier Wars
Frontier Wars
Northern Territory
Jesustown: A Novel (2022)
Daley, Paul
A gripping multi-generational saga about Australian frontier violence and cultural theft, and the myths that stand between us and history's unpalatable truths.
First Nations History
Western Australia
Jilya: How one Indigenous woman from the remote Pilbara transformed psychology (2024)
Tracy Westerman
From humble beginnings in the remote Pilbara, psychologist and Nyamal woman Tracy Westerman has redefined what’s possible at every turn. Despite neither of her parents progressing past primary school, and never having met a psychologist before attending university, Tracy went on to become the first Aboriginal person in Australia to complete a PhD in Clinical Psychology, rising to become one of the country’s foremost psychologists.
Frontier Wars
Queensland
Killing for Country: a Family Story (2023)
Marr, David
A gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia's frontier wars. David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history. This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today's Australia.
First Nations History
Queensland
Know Their Names (2025)
Lesley Synge
It concerns itself with the erasure of Aboriginal people from Australian history and examines the Queensland Government's Rewan Police Horse Breeding Station in the Central Highlands as a case study of erasure 1909-34.
First Nations History
Western Australia
Living in Hope (2017)
Byrne, Frank with Frances Coughlan and Gerard Waterford
This is the story of the early years of my life. The story of a boy who was taken away from his mother and his family forever when he was just six years old. He had no say in it. His family had no say in it. The government had all the say in everything.
First Nations History
Long Yarn Short: We are Still Here (2024)
Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts
At just ten years old, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts was forcibly removed – stolen – from her family, community and kinship systems. After eight years in various out-of-home care placements, Vanessa fled the system, reconnected with kin and returned to country for the very first time. Only then did she begin to heal. In this book, Vanessa embarks on an extraordinary work of truth-telling, exposing the ongoing violence visited on Black children, their families and their communities by the systems that claim to protect them.
First Nations History
Looking Black (2022)
Martin, Kelrick and Dan Bourchier, Executive Producers; ABC Indigenous
Explores the impact of Indigenous storytelling at the ABC, and how it has created deep and honest conversations about the experience of First Nations journalists, storytellers, and presenters.