In her new book, Tasmanian Aborigines, Lyndall Ryan might have limited herself to a fresh take on the subject of her first book, published nearly thirty years ago; but she does much more than that. This is a book about Australia’s first war. Fought within our own borders, against our own people, it was called the Black War. While it raged across the settled districts of the 1820s in the colony then known as Van Diemen’s Land, its results have left an indelible mark on Australia’s history and on the lives of families such as my own, which survived this tumultuous period.

Growing up in the small coastal town of Ulverstone on the north-west coast of Tasmania in the 1970s has left me with enduring memories. The winters were severe; the frost under our feet as we walked to school was thick. I remember watching the news on television. Every night I learned more about the Vietnam War. Knowing that this was being fought in far-away South-East Asia made our home feel secure: it would be an easy matter to stop the communists from reaching Tasmania. I thought that our remoteness, our icy winters, would ensure that war never came to Tasmania, not realising that one had already been fought – and lost – in the hills outside town.

Sometime before the Vietnam troops were brought home, we had a visitor. I had never met anyone from a university before. He asked questions about something my parents never talked about. Dr Bill Mollison was constructing genealogies of Tasmanian Aboriginal families. No one had done this before, and there were many questions to be answered. My grandmother would have no part of it. Nanna had fought too long to keep her family safe from this sort of thing. Her great-grandmother was born around 1812, the first ‘half-caste’ in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land. Nanna herself was just five years old when the Tasmanian government sent the skeleton of Truganini to be mounted at the Melbourne Museum – to become a macabre trophy of colonial success. Truganini came to symbolise the extinction of a people. History had recorded this as sad but somehow necessary. The following decades of ‘mopping up’ resulted in surviving families being confined to reserves and the removal of children, to be assimilated into the new white society.

Unlike Nanna, who wanted to forget, I was overcome with a need to know. Mollison’s visit drew my attention to something about my family that I had missed – a silence. In later years I noticed that this silence was widespread in Tasmania, almost palpable. To break the silence was to invite trouble. Despite my white skin, I experienced name-calling, violence, isolation. In a world built on the dichotomies of rich and poor, capitalism and communism, I found myself in the midst of another – black and white. Making sense of it all wasn’t easy. The silence was everywhere. I could find no books that explained what had happened in Tasmania. If a whole people had disappeared from view, how and why had it happened?

Around the time this existential crisis was raging in my mind, a PhD student at Macquarie University was completing her thesis, Aborigines in Tasmania, 1800–1974 and Their Problems with the Europeans. The book that resulted in 1981 was my first encounter with some answers to these questions. As I would soon discover, Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians was not the first to confront Tasmania’s secret history. In 1948, Tasmanian-born journalist Clive Turnbull had published Black War, a devastating summary of the experience of my ancestors at the hands of the Van Diemen’s Land colonists. Turnbull looked back on history with a sense of regret and injustice. He offered an extensive discussion of the policy and historical figures responsible for a determined and bloody effort to remove Tasmanian Aborigines from their land. However, in 1970s Tasmania this history seemed to have been left behind, part of a story that was too painful or difficult to explain.

Ryan’s success with The Aboriginal Tasmanians was as much about timing as it was about the content of her work. In 1966 the walk-off at Wave Hill station and Charlie Perkins’s Freedom Ride had marked the emergence of a modern political struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia. The following year an historic referendum provided constitutional recognition of Aborigines for the first time. Two years later, Lionel Rose became the first Aboriginal World Boxing Champion and was named Australian of the Year. Aboriginal legal and health services were springing up, and the 1972 Tent Embassy prompted action by the Whitlam Government to abolish the White Australia Policy and to establish the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. As Ryan finalised her PhD, the Australian parliament was passing the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) and Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1976).

I read Ryan’s first book in my final years of high school and appreciated the detailed explanation of the social and political legacy that I had inherited. While The Aboriginal Tasmanians introduced me to Turnbull and to pioneering volumes by Bonwick (1870) and Calder (1875); its most important contribution was to provide a context that was missing from these early works. The revolution that Ryan had brought about with her book was to contextualise a critical part of Australia’s history. In her own words, Ryan’s book offered the view that ‘Tasmania is the best place to understand the dreadful impact of settler colonialism on Aborigines across Australia’. The campaigns by Tasmanian Aborigines in the 1970s were as important in the story as was the armed resistance by their ancestors one hundred and fifty years earlier.

The impetus for publication of her new book comes from another war. Ryan’s historical research, along with that of Henry Reynolds, was targeted by Keith Windschuttle in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002). In one of the major skirmishes of what is known as Australia’s ‘history wars’, a vigorous attack was mounted on the rigour and validity of Ryan’s historical analysis, which included accounts of massacres and described seven years oforganised resistance to the occupation of Aboriginal land. Ryan, in her new book, confronts Windschuttle’s challenge and responds to it forcefully. Detailed maps and fifty-eight pages of referencing make this book a robust and compelling account, and an honourable successor to her earlier, seminal work.

Tasmanian Aborigines is not a story about the victims of relentless colonialism. Its key contribution is to redefine Aboriginal people as the survivors of Australia’s forgotten wars. More than any other historian, Ryan hasput the myth of Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction firmly to rest by describing the struggles of those, such as the ancestral matriarchs of my own family, who endured this savage period of Tasmanian history in order to protect their families, adapt to a changing world, and maintain their cultural traditions. Ryan has repeatedly urged Australians to confront the unacceptable absence of any recognition or memorial to Tasmania’s Black War. Tasmanian Aborigines explains why this is so necessary.