A review by stanro
Why Weren't We Told? by Henry Reynolds

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

Henry Reynolds is a preeminent Australian historian whose writings about the frontier wars in this land reshaped our sense of who we Australians are and how we come to control this continent. In this book, Why Weren’t We Told? he outlines the Australian story as he learned it when young, his experiences as a Tasmanian who commences an academic career in history in North Queensland and as a result of living there, starts to think deeply about the Australian frontier. 

After years of research among primary sources, and after expanding his scope from North Queensland to the whole continent, he comes to what I regard as a very important conclusion: that local Aborigines were more than passive victims of superior white armaments. Aborigines fought to protect their land from white encroachment and wars were fought on nearly every frontier as white settlement expanded. (His evidence for this is based on contemporaneous newspaper reports, letters published in newspapers, and settler and soldier diaries and reports.)

He then turns to “the history wars” where attempts to describe Australia as “invaded” in 1788 were debated and subject to ongoing political interference (not always along party lines) in the period from about 1988. In fact, Reynolds quotes several British sources describing, even before 1788!, that the establishment of the penal colony in 1788 and elsewhere, such as in Van Dieman’s land, used terms like invasion and conquest. 

Turning to the Mabo decision establishing a limited form of Indigrnous land rights by  the Australian High Court, it turns out that Reynolds knew and worked with Eddie Mabo and was the person who told Mabo that under Australian law, he did not own his family’s land. Many years later, Mabo won his case and a new era of law, still a rather weak model but a real improvement on terra nullius, came upon us. 

Then he movs to the later High Court Wik decision concerning pastoral leases and establishing that such leases do not extinguish Native Title. 

This book is about his personal journey rather than an assembly of all his evidence, though as I’ve also referred to, he provides us with some of that. 

#areadersjourney