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Best Books of the Year 2005

by
December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

Best Books of the Year 2005

by
December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

Neal Blewett

The most vituperative of the contemporary ‘history wars’ – the conflict over the historiography of the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples – will ultimately be resolved by high-quality regional studies of the processes of occupation. Tony Roberts’s Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 (UQP), covering the first stages of European settlement of the Gulf Country, is exemplary: original, meticulous, and dispassionate. Roberts, never unsympathetic, seeks to understand both the viewpoint of the settlers and that of the dispossessed. With a wider perspective than usual on the historiographical debate itself, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Allen & Unwin), by one of the generals in the war, Bain Attwood, is the most effective broadside this year. On a quieter note, Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller’s Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art (Miegunyah) is the definitive account of the seminal modern art exhibition – dispelling myths, documenting missed opportunities by a myopic art establishment, and setting the exhibition in the context of modernism in Australia. So sumptuous and well-integrated in the text are the illustrations that the reader visits the exhibition.

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