Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788
By (Author) Bruce Elder
New Holland Publishers
New Holland Publishers
1st April 2003
3rd Revised edition
Australia
General
Non Fiction
Australasian and Pacific history
994.0049915
Paperback
320
Voted one of the ten most influential works on non-fiction of the last century, Blood on the Wattle draws together, in a single volume, most of the information about the massacres of Aboriginal people that have been recorded in books and journals.It also creates a broad-based level of awareness of the scale of the massacres of Aboriginal people so that this dimension of Australian history can become part of the Australian consciousness.
"I was given [Blood on the Wattle] by a cousin of mine who works for Aboriginal Affairs and I was in a daze. I mean, I was just reading page after page after page of massacres and really the only thing that I knew of my Aboriginality was that I belonged to the Wiradjuri tribe. Then I came to a page where most of the Wiradjuri tribe were wiped out..." --Evonne Cawley, The Midday Show, 18 May 1992
Bruce Elder is a writer, commentator, and currently a full-time journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald specialising in travel and popular culture. His other areas of expertise include film, television and popular music. He has written extensively about Australia and has a passion for Australian history. He has been involved in writing over 60 books, including Blood on the Wattle which, in 2000, was nominated as one of the 10 most influential works of non-fiction published in Australia in the twentieth century.