Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas, but there are no official commemorations of the battles fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists. Delving into why it is more controversial to talk about the frontier war now than it was 100 years ago, Forgotten War continues the story told in Henry Reynolds’ seminal book The Other Side of the Frontier, which argues that the settlement of Australia had a high level of violence and conflict that people chose to ignore. That book prompted a flowering of research and fieldwork that Reynolds draws on here to give a thorough and systematic account of what caused the frontier wars, how many people died, and whether the colonists themselves saw frontier conflict as a form of warfare. This powerful book makes it clear that there can be no reconciliation in Australia without acknowledging the wars fought on its own soil.
Henry Reynolds is a professor of history at the University of Tasmania and one of Australia’s most prominent historians. He is the author of Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land; The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia; and Why Weren’t We Told?: A Personal Search for the Truth about Our History and the coauthor of Drawing the Global Colour Line and What’s Wrong with ANZAC?: The Militarisation of Australian History.
