‘We are at war with them,’ wrote a Tasmanian settler in 1831.
‘What we call their crime is what in a white man we should call patriotism.’ Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. So why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists? Why is it more controversial to talk about the frontier wars now than it was one hundred years ago?
In Forgotten War, winner of the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Award for non-fiction, influential historian Henry Reynolds makes it clear that there can be no reconciliation without acknowledging the wars fought on our own soil. Reynolds argues the resistance by First Nations warriors to the invasion of their homelands, lasting for more than a hundred years, can now be seen as a significant chapter in the global history of anti-colonial rebellion.
To be appreciated and understood in a way that has scarcely begun to dawn on our national consciousness, and admired far more widely than our role as adjunct imperialists fighting with Britain and America.
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