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‘Even when there’s simultaneity,’ as one of Michael Wilding’s characters says, there’s still linearity that needs to be found, and linearity is difficult to find in this group of books. So, it is better, as Wilding’s book also suggests, to let the books perform and then see the pattern they make. Pacific Highway, in fact, is a kind of haiku novel, which coheres into a single expressive emblem, the emblem of the dance its narrator offers us at the end.

These three books on Aboriginal European relations are a reminder that the process of rewriting the history of contact of Australian Aboriginals (or should one say Aboriginal Australians?) has come a long way since C.D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, the work which started it all twelve years ago. Each is important in its own way. Lyndall Ryan’s book (The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 315 p., $22.50) demolishes once and for all what the author calls ‘the myth of the last Tasmanian’: the still widely held belief that Tasmanian Aboriginals perished in 1876 when Truganini died in Hobart. Judith Wright’s work (The Cry For The Dead, OUP, 301 p., $19.95 hb), although essentially a story of the tragic struggle or the author’s squatter forbears, is one of the few attempts ever made to incorporate Aboriginal perspective into the history of pastoral expansion, to run the white and black ‘versions’ of events side by side. Henry Reynolds’s epoch-making book (The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, 255 p., $6.95 pb, first published in hardback by History Department, James Cook University, 216 p., $7.50 plus postage) documents and interprets’ some of the Aboriginal responses to European invasion and settlement during the nineteenth century. All three are well written, although The Cry for the Dead is at times a bit irritating and difficult to follow, largely because of the lack of appropriate maps. All attack traditional wisdom and are therefore inescapably political, dealing as they do with highly emotional issues which have aroused a great deal of passion ever since 1788.

Primitive accumulation was a brutal process often performed by gentlemen. Not all pastoralists were brutes – unless they had to be. Not all Aboriginals were murdered – unless they had to be. Facades of normality were hurriedly erected to confound Karl Marx. For a moment the Australian pastoralists could build oases of sophistication on the Australian landscape. For a generation or so they managed to impose a uniquely Australian gentility around the waterholes and rivers. That the phenomenon was a passing one is symbolised by the life and death of James Bourke in the Riverina. A secondary pioneer, he died at the age of twenty-four. His brother Thomas, ‘a fine athletic man’ died of the booze aged twenty-six. The body of his step-uncle, James Peter, was found in the river a few days later: he had been in ‘a severe fit of the horrors’. All sorts of disasters of a man-made kind – from fatal flaws to death duties – combined with the elements to wash away the billabong dynasties.

Beatrice and Sydney Webb are still alive, though failing. At least, that is the impression one gets from these five pamphlets, which mark the resurrection of the Victorian Fabian Society since 1980, after temporarily shaking off the mortal after coil.