Bain Attwood’s edited volume (which includes papers by seven other anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, as well as an essay and introduction by the editor) does differ from many other studies of the Mabo decision because of its primarily non-legal emphasis. This is a book about how history is made, how we come to know it, and how historical knowledges reverberate in other spheres of Australian life.

The contributors to In the Age of Mabo include some of the most respected and influential non-indigenous commentators on contemporary Aboriginal and Islander history and anthropology: Henry Reynolds, Deborah Bird Rose, Andrew Markus, and Attwood himself. Surprisingly, for a book which highlights the intersection of indigenous and ‘settler’ approaches to politics and history and the ‘Aboriginalisation’ of Australian culture, there are no Black Australian contributors. Moreover, in his introduction Attwood does not really explain the methodology he adopted in selecting his essayists. What he does do is make it explicit that this book is a product of the Keating era, one in which the discourses of history (or, at least, a certain type of revisionist history) were for the first time since the early 1970s given centre stage by the highest elected office in the land. For this reason, one finds three of the contributors to the volume quoting the significance of Paul Keating’s Redfern speech of December 1992 – for two main reasons.

The first is that the speech conforms to the theoretical underpinning of Attwood’s book: the assumption that the Mabo decision was both the result of, and the producer of, historical scholarship. The second is the personal connection afforded by the writer of that speech, Don Watson, whose role is highlighted as an example of the centrality of professional historians during the Keating era.

Thus, it is tempting to see the genesis of this collection as a direct parallel to the way in which the historical and legal decision called ‘Mabo’ metamorphosed into political, social, and cultural debate. In the simplest terms, Attwood’s book interrogates why and how history was made and unmade when the Mabo decision travelled out of the courtroom and into the collective Australian loungeroom.

He spells out his conviction that the sea-change caused by the High Court’s ruling will be, in the end, a historical one; he argues for a new historical narrative – new ways of speaking about Australia’s past in the present. Why? The reason is that ‘the conventional historical narrative cannot conceive of Australia being modern and Aboriginal, or Aboriginals being Aboriginal and Australian’.

Attwood and many of his contributors certainly can envisage a different formula. based more on mutual accommodation than upon any nebulous doctrine of reconciliation. At its best, In the Age of Mabo opens up distinctive and challenging perspectives on contemporary indigenous culture and Australian race relations. For example, in a chapter which is a model of intellectual rigor, documentary scholarship and cogent reasoning, Henry Reynolds examines the one dissenting judgment to the High Court decision. In a piece which shows beyond doubt that Australian native title pre-dates Mabo by more than 150 years, Reynolds comprehensively rebuts Justice Dawson’s historical interpretations.

A very different but equally persuasive chapter is Deborah Bird Rose’s ‘Histories and Rituals’. Focusing upon the interplay of all the participants, Rose observes that many successful land rights hearings in the Northern Territory have been altered by Aboriginal claimants from a linear, legal process into a more circular, performative one. According to Rose, in these cases the indigenous petitioners literally took the legal stage and took control of proceedings. However, she also observes that these successes (to date, about thirty-six per cent of the land in the Territory is now under Aboriginal freehold title) carry with them a profound risk for native title elsewhere in Australia:

The possibility is that in the post-Mabo era these land claims could become a canon of authenticity for proof of land tenure systems which could oppress and dispossess … if Aboriginal people in other parts of Australia are required to reproduce this particular Aboriginality and, unable or unwilling to do so, fail to achieve legal recognition as native title holders.

This pattern – the competing forces of promise versus thwarted aspirations – is one which runs through the entire book. Some contributors, such as Andrew Markus and Tim Murray, explore the frustrations, ironies, and contradictions of this extremely well. Others, such as John Morton, overbalance into a zone of wish fulfilment, in which the so-called ‘indigenisation’ of Australia is seen as being both benign and utopian. Morton goes so far as to suggest that Aboriginality (that catch-all phrase) has the power to becomes a ‘symbolic substitution … for the monarchy’. Morton’s controversial piece loses its way through its rather woolly generalisations, especially when these veer into the territory of cultural pronouncements for which there is no proof. In a typical example, he puts it rather fulsomely:

A sense of kinship between white and black Australians … is what accounts for the popularity of works like Sally Morgan’s book, My Place … with sales approaching record proportions, My Place may eventually convert the whole of Australia.

It is equally possible that the bestseller status of Morgan’s book is due to the appeal of its self-discovery narrative, its open style, or its gentle humour. It may also appeal because, unlike the Mabo decision, it is not perceived by the Australian community as being either radical or threatening. Even if Morton’s point is tongue-in-cheek, he puts a huge burden on one author; one book, however impressive, is not going to be the passport to a new history of reconciliation.

While there is much that is right about Attwood’s collection, Morgan’s piece is symptomatic of what is wrong with it. A number of the contributors are prisoners of what could be called ‘recentism’. The events which many of his essayists recount are so much a part of recent history, and are founded so firmly upon that historical moment called the ‘Keating revolution’, that they seem rudderless now that the Keating era is over.

Much like the referendum of 1967, Mabo has turned out to be less of a paradigm shift than many had hoped. Its aftermath has been slow and painstaking: it has changed Australia forever, but nowhere near as radically or swiftly as many had predicted. Even more: since the accession of the Howard government, basic tenets of the national native title legislation have been called even more insistently into question. This book was born during and reflects a fleeting historical moment of optimistic revolution but, like 1967, frustrated expectations and manifestations of backlash are as much symptoms of the process as utopian visions.