McGregor, Russell (2014) Book review of "The Black War: fear, sex and resistance in Tasmania" by Nicholas Clements. Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2014. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 60 (3). pp. 466-467.

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Abstract

[Extract] Nicholas Clements sets himself a formidable task: to write a social history of the Black War in colonial Tasmania giving empathetic appraisals of the motivations and attitudes of both colonists and Aboriginal people. Unhappy with the polarities generated by Australia's history wars, he seeks "to circumvent the ideological stalemate by systematically juxtaposing Aboriginal and colonial perspectives" (p.6). To this end, he divides each chapter into two roughly equal parts, one recounting the conflict from the colonists' stance, the other from the Aboriginal. Inevitably, given the paucity of Aboriginal sources, the colonists' outlooks are recreated more adroitly, but Clements makes a commendable foray into what his mentor, Henry Reynolds, has called "the other side of the frontier".

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