The information on Aboriginal society is revealed as we need to know, a good practice in my view, but more information would have been helpful. We do not learn how many tribes there were or estimates of the total population before the European arrival. There is no map of Aboriginal Tasmania – but there are no maps of any sort. In deference to the anthropologists, Reynolds calls the tribes ‘language groups’ except in discussing conflict between them, when he opts for ‘intertribal warfare’ – a pity on one view, for the absurdity of ‘inter-language-group warfare’ might have exploded the anthropologists’ terminology. After his unhappy experiences with the Aborigines, Governor Arthur said treaties should have been made with the chiefs and their tribes. Reynolds seemingly endorses this view without establishing the correctness of Arthur’s understanding of Aboriginal social structure. If Arthur was wrong about this, then treaties may not have been feasible even in negotiation, let alone enforcement.

A chapter is devoted to the Black War, with Reynolds insisting that the conflict between Europeans and Aborigines became truly a war; whether that is an appropriate description was one of the issues debated in the recent ‘history wars’. Keith Windschuttle began his revisionist work with a study of Tasmania in which he argued that Aborigines were not resistance fighters but were bent on plunder and vengeance. Reynolds ignores Windschuttle but strangely describes the taking of food and other goods from the settlers as stealing, which was Windschuttle’s term.

Reynolds works with his usual sensitivity on cross-cultural dealings in his account of George Robinson’s mission to collect the remaining Aborigines and persuade them to take refuge on Flinders Island. He argues convincingly that an undertaking had been given that the Aborigines could return to their lands – an early treaty that was broken. But he will not accept that the Flinders Island settlement should be likened to a concentration camp. The Aborigines saw themselves as exiles and were mostly treated as such, with rations and clothes being supplied by right; the work of the settlement was done by convicts. The Aboriginal death rate was high, but not as a result of neglect or mistreatment.

In his treatment of the convict system, Reynolds handicaps himself by adopting the recent scholarly view that ‘convicts were ordinary members of the working class rather than serious criminals’. Reynolds claims that this is the view of Alison Alexander, author of Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society (2010), the one historian he names. Actually, she is not a member of the ‘no criminals’ school. She rightly avoids a single characterisation of the convicts, and gives this account of them: ‘I estimate that perhaps 10 per cent of convicts had been professional thieves, earning a living by crime; another 15 per cent were casual labourers cum petty thieves, doing what they could to get by; and about 75 per cent were ordinary working-class people who had a job but supplemented their low earnings by petty theft’ – a conclusion that deserves to be widely known. Reynolds ignores Alexander’s first two categories and claims that all convicts were unremarkable members of the working class, who, back in Britain, were (more amazing still) deferential to their social superiors. So when they were undeferential in Tasmania it was because of the process of transportation and the oppression of the convict system! In fact, the floggings and hangings were meted out overwhelmingly to the people of Alexander’s first two categories in an effort, only partially successful, to stop their thieving, drinking, and wandering about, and to get some work out of them. If they had ever been deferential, they had ceased to be so long before they were put on the boats.

Tasmania is distinctive among the Australian colonies for the high proportion of its convict population and the complete elimination of the Aborigines (part-Aborigines survived on the Bass Strait islands). It is, as Jim Davidson has written, ‘a landscape containing presences’. Or, he continues, ‘Perhaps these are more correctly styled absences not fully expiated’. Such a perspective has nourished a rich literature, what Davidson called ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ (Meanjin, No. 2, 1989). In deciding to exclude literature from his book (even For the Term of his Natural Life), Reynolds has made a large sacrifice, but did he need to exclude that quintessential Gothic site, Port Arthur, now in ruins? There is no account of this huge complex of buildings, its location, purpose, operation, or present condition.

Reynolds’s announced themes are ‘political development along with economic and social change’, and on these he serves his readers well. Tasmania’s distinctiveness here lies in long periods of stagnation with a constant exodus of population leaving behind dense networks of kinship and friendship (which mainlanders call something different). Reynolds highlights the economic benefits of the British expenditure on the convict system and the correctness of the local prophecy that it would be ruinous to stop it. Prosperity returned in the 1880s with small farming in the forest country and the mineral discovery on the west coast.

There was an early interest in the wild landscape, so that ‘the modern environmental movement has deep roots in Tasmania’. The success of the Greens might also relate to another experience that Reynolds highlights: the feeling of marginality. The Greens and their supporters have found a way to overcome this by making themselves leaders in a national movement. A small marginal state in a wider system of states has two characteristic responses: to attempt to match the big players or to be a model for them. With hydroelectricity, Tasmania was to match the industrialisation on the mainland; the Greens killed off that option and offered instead Tasmania as a model of sustainable living.

My disappointment with some aspects of this book will be evident. I had high hopes for it, because I am a great admirer of Reynolds’s earlier work on Tasmania, ‘“That hated stain”: The aftermath of transportation in Tasmania’ (Historical Studies, no. 53). This article, a work of great forensic power, argues that if convicts were responsible for Australian anti-authoritarian attitudes, those attitudes should be most evident in Tasmania, whereas in the nineteenth century its proletariat was the most dispirited in Australia and the colony ‘the most conservative, the most traditional and Anglophile, the most “un-Australian” in outlook’. Reynolds now finds more spirit in the ex-convicts, but how far he disowns the work I admired he does not say.