Guardian Australia
New book asserts that a fundamental cause of the Black War in Tasmania – besides the colonial land grab – was sex …
Many recent non-fiction books about the terrible violence between European settlers and Aboriginal people on the Australian colonial frontier have tended to pick a side.
But a Tasmanian academic, Nicholas Clements, has sought to bring new balance to the complex and disturbing story of the violent conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people in Van Diemen’s Land in his recently released book, The Black War – Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania.
It was an ambitious and culturally courageous aim given the paradigm – left or right, black or white – through which so much contemporary history of frontier violence has been presented and received in Australia since the 1990s.
In interviews promoting The Black War, Clements stressed his determination to break the “circularity” of debate that has swirled around the “history war” over frontier violence between conservative and progressive historians.
Indeed, Clements expressed hope his book would even end the history wars.
It was a view strongly echoed by the pre-eminent historian and fellow Tasmanian Henry Reynolds, who has done more, perhaps, than any other Australian since the mid-1960s to tell the deeply discomfiting truth about the violence that festers at the heart of Australian sovereignty.
