Of the three, I have personally found Lyndall Ryan’s book the least interesting, no doubt because much of the story has already been recorded. Tasmanian Aboriginals have received. more attention in historical literature, both serious and popular, than their mainland kinsmen: most Australians know about the Black Lae, Robinson the ‘God’s Fool’ and Truganini and her skeleton, and even the story of the 3,000 or so surviving ‘Tasmanians’ has been told, in part, by Stephen Murray-Smith in an excellent article published in 1973 in the Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association.

That is not to say that The Aboriginal Tasmanians does not break new ground. The author – who is currently a lecturer in the School of Humanities at Griffith University – has assimilated the most recent findings of anthropologists and pre-historians, and this has enabled her to show convincingly the economic and demographic impact of the invasion on individual bands and tribes. She has categorised the phases of conflict from 1803 onward and has demonstrated that it was the pastoral expansion from 1820 on which ultimately sealed the Tasmanians’ fate. She has documented their determined opposition to the invaders and in the process arrived at the somewhat unexpected conclusion that Tasmania (with a ‘kill-ratio’ of 4:1 in the Europeans’ favour) had never seen the levels of mindless violence witnessed later in parts of Victoria and New South Wales and most of Queensland.

The thing which worries me about The Aboriginal Tasmanians is its sledgehammer approach. In her attempt to rewrite the story of contact and to expiate the sins, real or imaginary, of her white forebears, the author has come close to reducing history – to borrow Manning Clark’s phrase – to a ‘caricature’, rather than corresponding to anything ‘how it actually was’. There are too many over-simplifications, too many ‘evil’ Europeans in her story; everything is presented as either black or white. As Murray-Smith put it in his already mentioned study of nineteenth century part-Tasmanians, ‘the [Cape, Barren] Islanders deserve every ounce of understanding and informed sympathy that we can give them, and so do those outsiders who worked for, or even against, them’. All the protagonists – and I would include here even that misguided fool Robinson – simply acted within the terms of their morality. To quote Murray-Smith again: ‘There are, in short, few if any villains – which does not mean that we are not entitled to express our latter-day feelings about the matter, of course. But they are latter-day feelings’.

Similar comments can be made about the author’s idealisation of the Tasmanians’ struggle against the invaders and the steadfast determination of the surviving mixed-bloods to maintain a separate ‘Aboriginal’ identity.

This, too, is reading history backwards, especially as far as the second theme is concerned. For instance, it seems highly unlikely that, during the 1870s and 1880s ‘some Islanders had not paid leasehold rent because they considered the land theirs . . . by virtue of their Aboriginal ancestry’ (p. 229) or that by 1908 ‘those of the lighter colour liked to retain their identity as Aboriginal’ (p. 239), while the statement that such was the case throughout south-eastern Australia, made in the same context is demonstrably false. There was no grand ideological strategy involved, no heroic stance (in Tasmania or on the mainland), and to suggest otherwise is merely to replace one myth by another. Which is not only historically unsound but also politically self-defeating, and will only provide ammunition for those who are opposed to the present-day Aboriginal demands for redress and compensation for past injustices.

By contrast, Judith Wright’s The Cry For the Dead is a strikingly balanced and objective work. Ostensibly a tribute to the author’s pioneering grandparents, Albert and May Wright, the book is a personal cri de coeur for all the dead – the Aboriginals, the settlers, the flora and the fauna –destroyed by the spread of settlement from Sydney Cove into the Hunter Valley and Liverpool Plains, the New England and Namoi River country, the Darling Downs and finally the Burnett .and Dawson River areas of central Queensland.

The book’s title is derived from Gideon Lang’s The Aborigines of Australia that describes the ‘peculiar chaunts they sing in honour of the recently dead, generally just before daybreak, and some of these are very touching’. The Cry For the Dead is, first and foremost, a chant for all the Kamilaroi, Bigambul, Wadja, Jimun, Garingbal, Jangga and other tribespeople killed in combat, massacred in reprisal, poisoned in spite or killed by white man’s disease. But it is also a lament for the dead settlers and their families who laboured (mainly in vain) with great courage and tenacity, as well as the convicts, ticket-of-leave men, Chinamen and Kanakas who accompanied them on their treks – victims of disease, malnutrition, Aboriginal spears, drought, floods, isolation and, above all, despair. And finally, the book is a lament for the land destroyed by the invaders’ failure to understand the needs and the fragility of the new dark continent.

Judith Wright’s description of the country in its pristine state is pure poetry, as is her account of the land’s revenge – the ugly erosion, the thousands of cattle killed by disease, the unstoppable march of an army of rabbits, the spread of brigalow, wattle scrub and the prickly pear. Especially prickly pear, which ‘had advanced far in the drought, as men gave up their land and their battle. [Everywhere] those scattered plants were turning into impenetrable walls of green, taller than a man. The roads were lined with them, smothering fences, crowding around abandoned homesteads, separating neighbour from neighbour, invading the streets of towns and the dried gardens of the townships. Pear crawled through the dry scrubs of brigalow and made them even more impossible to clear’ (p. 267).

The Cry For the Dead is, at least in my estimation, a minor masterpiece. Its Aboriginals, it is true, resemble a bit too much the textbook Aboriginals of a generation ago, and the story itself is not always easy to follow, but otherwise the book is difficult to fault. The author has no axe to grind, except to tell what really happened – or rather, what it felt like to be a participant in the events she describes. The result is an unembellished account of the tragic frontier clash in which there were many heroes but no victors – unless it was the banks and other money-lenders who event­ually acquired most of the heavily mortgaged properties. The story has all the elements of classic tragedy: the Aboriginals resisting in vain the superior forces they did not understand, the settlers unable to pull out or stop the slaughter (for some did have qualms of conscience about their wrongdoings), no matter how much they may have wanted to. Their actions were dictated not by morality (are things all that different today?) but by the high interest they had borrowed their money at. They were overtaken by events, and ultimately paid the price.

Despite its shortcomings, Henry Reynold’s The Other: Side of the Frontier is a tour de force by one of the pioneers of the Aboriginal perspective in. Australian history, one who, in the words of one enraptured reviewer, has done the seemingly impossible by documenting the responses of a pre-literate people: Although shorter than the other two works mentioned, it is the product of ten years of painstaking search through Australia’s libraries and archives. I have deliberately used the term search rather than the more respectable research: there was no certainty that the quest would be rewarded in the end, no thesis to prove or disprove until the work was all but accomplished. The author’s own words on this point are most enlightening:

The decision to concentrate attention on the other side of the frontier was quite a recent one. Initially I was convinced, like many previous Australian scholars, that such a study would be difficult to consummate, that the evidence was too fragmentary to sustain serious scholarship, or that the Aboriginal psyche was so different that it was uniquely resistant to the historical imagination. I became convinced that both these propositions were awry and in fact they gave way together as the evidence piled slowly and inexorably as a sand-drift. Much of the evidence was found by chance and for at least the first five years collected out of curiosity more than with the expectation of writing a book like this one.

Considering the task he had set himself, Reynolds succeeds admirably in presenting the Aboriginal perspective of European invasion arid settlement, even though he is at pains to stress that his is a white man’s interpretation of that fatal encounter.

The title notwithstanding (he had used it previously for a 1976 article on the subject), the books covers only the nineteenth century, thus virtually omitting the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys, and discusses only some Aboriginal responses, while ignoring or playing down others. Its main theme is that there was no single, uniform Aboriginal response (which may displease those who stereotype the Aboriginal as a 19th century rural guerrilla), that Aboriginal reaction was highly flexible, with groups or even individuals reacting according to local conditions and circumstances, and that the Aboriginal way of life itself was at once more conservative and more adaptable than we have come to believe. This was reflected in general ambivalence on their part: insistence on Aboriginal cultural identity and preservation of the old ways on the one hand, and curiosity and an almost uncontrollable desire for the white man’s material possessions on the other. This juxtaposition, incidentally, provides a perfect explanation for the ‘every Aboriginal is a thief’ image held by most Europeans. Without being aware’ of it, many Europeans had become ‘assimilated’ into Aboriginal social structure, and when they refused to share their possessions, the Aboriginals saw this as a repudiation of a social obligation and reacted accordingly.

The book is so full of ideas and so rich in detail that it is difficult to summarize. Among the themes which I found most interesting was the Aboriginals’ use of sorcery as one way of resisting the invader; the various forms of economic warfare they employed and their effect on settlement; the emergence of non-traditional leaders in response to European presence, and the persistence of traditional notions of causality which led to continued belief that all introduced illnesses (except venereal disease which was associated with sexual contact with Europeans) were caused by the malignant magic of distant tribes. Above all, I appreciated the balanced approach to the whole question of frontier violence and Aboriginal death toll – estimated by Reynolds at about 20,000, or less than seven per cent of the pre 1788 population.

At the same time, I was a bit disappointed in finding nothing on the role played by Aboriginal ‘Quislings’ (the native troopers and trackers) in the extermination of the 20,000 Aboriginal Australians, and only very little on what is known as ‘voluntary migration’ from tribal countries with still plentiful supply of traditional food in the direction of white man’s fleshpots – both clearly within the scope of the book. Have these responses been omitted because the findings may not flatter the Aboriginals or even harm their cause? The latter, in particular, is potential political dynamite: if, as W.E.H. Stanner had put it almost a quarter of a century ago, ‘for every Aborigine who, so to speak, had Europeans thrust upon him, at least one other sought them out’ (and abandoned his tribal land and sacred sites in the process), the whole question of Aboriginal land rights becomes a completely new ball game. Perhaps it is a good thing that multinational mining consortia do not have resident historians on their staff.

Finally, the book has certain organisational shortcomings. Chapter six, entitled ‘The Pastoral Frontier’, is superfluous since it virtually recapitulates earlier chapters, while chapter seven, called ‘Other Frontiers’, is far too sketchy, and the treatment of the mining and especially missionary frontier entirely unconvincing. The conclusion is not so much a summary or analysis of findings as a plea for the inclusion of Aboriginal dead ‘in the pantheon of national heroes’ and for the need ‘to give due weight to the Aboriginal perceptions of ourselves’. In this context, I have found the statement that Aboriginals believe all white men to be hypocrites slightly amusing, since many ‘continental’ Europeans hold the same belief about the average Australian – even though they are too polite or simply unconcerned to say so publicly. Is it perhaps that the time has come for a ‘New Australian’ perspective in Australian history? I most sincerely hope not.