The Australian Wars

(Hardback)

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It is estimated up to 100,000 people died from the frontier wars that raged in Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. But there are few memorials marking these first, local wars.

The Australian Wars was conceived by Rachel Perkins following her award-winning documentary series of the same name and edited alongside Henry Reynolds, Mina Murray and Stephen Gapps. This is the first book to tell the story of the continental sweep of massacres, guerilla warfare, resistance and the contests of firearms and traditional Aboriginal weaponry as Indigenous nations resisted colonial occupation of their lands, territory by territory. At stake was the sovereignty of an entire country.

Black and white writers, historians and military experts including Perkins, Reynolds, Thomas Mayo, Marcia Langton, David Marr and Kim Scott tell the stories of these battles across three crucial time periods, and all the states and territories. It notes the lands that were unconquered, as well as the role of disease, weapons and tactics, and the story of women on the frontier.

This history is still alive in those descendants who carry the stories of their ancestors. The Australian Wars brings what for too long has been considered the historical past into the present so that we might know the truth of the origins of this nation.

'As it peels back the enduring veils of silence and denial about our shared past, The Australian Wars exposes a complex legacy of shame, pride, crime and valour. It offers us an opportunity to ask ourselves, in a spirit of humility and honesty, what it truly means to be an Australian patriot. The authors of this work have delivered a huge favour wrapped in a hard lesson.' TIM WINTON

'An inspiring, game-changing work of collective truth-telling about our shared history.' KATE GRENVILLE

'This book provides the most comprehensive account available of the continental violence against Aboriginal people during the colonial settlement and some of its consequences today. Rachel Perkins and her fellow editors have done us all a great service in bringing this history together. Some opinions will be disputed and there will be debate about how these conflicts will be characterised and memorialised, but it is for all Australians, whether descended from the pioneer generations or not, to respond to this history by ensuring that every person in today's Australia is treated with equal respect and dignity, and provided with the opportunities that all people deserve' DAVID KEMP AC


'Together with the TV series The Australian Wars puts down a marker: no more denial, no more cant. These wars happened and we cannot blink them away. The Australian frontier was a battlefield, and we should recognise this as we recognise those other battlefields in Turkey, France and New Guinea. We should remember the dead, honour the brave. It will give us a firmer basis for thinking clearly about who we are and what to do.' DON WATSON

Author Bio

Rachel Perkins is an Indigenous Australian film and television director, producer, and screenwriter. Stephen Gapps is a historian and Adjunct at Charles Sturt University. Mina Murray is a Wiradjuri scholar and historian researching 19th Century Indigenous resistance. Henry Reynolds is an Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict.