The growth in understanding of the tens of thousands of years of this continent’s pre-colonial and post-colonial Aboriginal history has been one of the great intellectual achievements of postwar Australia. But if these two collections of essays are any guide, there are reasons to be gravely concerned about the future of this field of knowledge.

Many will probably regard Reframing Indigenous Biography and Deep History as examples of ‘truth-telling’. But insofar as moral categories such as these are useful – I doubt they are – these volumes might be regarded as exemplars of ‘untruthful history’.

Bain Attwood

Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University. He is the author of several books about the history of Indigenous and settler peoples in Australia and New Zealand. His prize-winning book Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, property and Indigenous people (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2020, and his latest book, 'A Bloody Difficult Subject': Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the making of history, was published by Auckland University Press in May 2023. He is currently working on a project called 'Denial, Distance and Australia’s Black History', which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Germany.