Cassandra Pybus is a fifth-generation Tasmanian; she lives near some of the events described in the book; her ancestor Richard Pybus held land almost contiguous with Robinson’s first holding on North Bruny Island; she dedicates her book to Jim Everett, the well-known Flinders Island-born Koori.

The book begins at Oyster Cove, her present residence and where the last survivors of Flinders Island were returned to mainland Tasmania. When she first proposed to write the story of these events she was told by a relative, ‘First we steal the blackfellas’ land, then we deny them an identity, and now you want to steal their story for your own intellectual purposes’. Pybus conceded that she had a point.

Not all White Tasmanians share Pybus’s sensibilities. In 1827, Robinson reported that thirty Aboriginals were killed by shepherds and thrown over the cliffs at Cape Grim. Visiting this ‘ancient and stunning landscape’, Pybus was told that ‘busybodies’ like herself had caused the Van Diemen’s Land Company (in existence then and now) ‘any amount of trouble by repeating patent untruths’. The Bass Strait island Whites, who occupy the several islands over which Robinson, sealers, and Aboriginal women disputed possession in the 1830s, continue ‘virulent opposition to land rights by denying that Aboriginals have any prior claim’. A visitor to Flinders Island, the best known of Robinson’s Aboriginal institutions, must tread with some delicacy when making enquiries about the Aboriginal legacy. The same may be said about other places which share a specific and separate Aboriginal and White history such as the Overland Telegraph Station/Aboriginal ‘Half-Caste-Home’ at Alice Springs. And yet these few places are merely symbols of nationwide shared usages. It is the whole of the continent which we inhabit with a more or less dispossessed Aboriginal past and present.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Whether we should be here or not, the fact is we are here. Whites, whatever the misdeeds of their forebears, have roots in this country too:

It seems to me that the stories contained in this landscape are critical to my self-definition; to my pride in being Australian and a fifth generation of white immigrants born into this benign and lovely place. We are shaped by this past … and we need to know about it. We need to know how it is we white Australians call this country home.

Focusing on Oyster Cove, Cape Grim, and Flinders Island, Pybus raises a new synthesis of the 1990s. She explores the possibility that, through a historical understanding of a painful past, we can go some way towards validating our claim, not to the country itself, but to a sharing of it with the Indigenous people.

That is the purpose of the book. It is less important, then, that I do not fully accept Pybus’s version of Robinson, described by Henry Reynolds in the foreword as ‘neither the noble conciliator nor the evil “black” Robinson of recent report’. Her version is a man craving authority, status, salary, recognition, and the title ‘Commandant’. Robinson, according to Pybus, posturing like ‘an antipodean Caesar … made a fundamental connection between his own fortunes and those of the Aboriginal people’. She continues by suggesting that his ‘genuine humane impulses continually fuelled his baser drives for personal and economic gratification’. I do not argue necessarily for a more friendly treatment of Robinson, for, given Pybus’s sympathies, we could scarcely expect that. What I do argue for is a more complex analysis or, in the absence of sufficient evidence, the admission ‘I don’t fully understand him’.

At other points Pybus, reading between the lines of events past, makes some penetrating suggestions. She argues that Fanny Cochrane Smith, thought to have been the ‘last Tasmanian half-caste’, and who died long after Truganini, was of full descent.

She speculates that the two whalers, killed by the Tasmanian Aboriginals who had gone to Victoria with Robinson, were known to their killers for some past Tasmanian misdeed. She correctly notes that if Robinson had left the tribes in the wilder country alone they might, like the Arnhem Landers, have survived to be there still. Phrases such as ‘I think it possible that …’ occur regularly in the text. The interpolations are never without interest or good sense.

The force of the book carries the reader past Robinson, Woorredy, Truganini, and the other principal characters to 1991. Though we did not steal the land, we are the inheritors of that theft. Now that the first passionate outrage of historians and others of the past two decades has begun to run its course, how can White Australians escape from the moral burden of membership of this community of thieves short of leaving the county?

By implication Pybus offers a public validation of her own occupation and love of certain parts of east coast Tasmania to which she felt no adequate moral claim. She argues her attachment primarily through history, by understanding and relating with sympathy and conviction the events of the local Aboriginal dispossession. Partly as a consequence of this undertaking, she knows and supports some Tasmanian Kooris and argues their cause before a variety of hostile Tasmanian Whites.

Community of Thieves, then, is a White Australian’s parallel to Sally Morgan’s My Place. Morgan established her place. Whether Pybus established hers (she makes no claim to have done so at the end of the book) is for her to determine rather than readers, for hers is a personal quest, as indeed all such quests must be until a genuine peace treaty is signed with the Aboriginals. Among the many different kinds of validations that White Australians are already attempting, a personalised historical understanding such as Pybus demonstrates will surely be one of the most fruitful.