There are some faults of balance. Archie Weller writes the entry on ‘Short Stories’ and, while entering into a not very convincing justification of his own literary portrayals of Aborigines, gives himself far more lines than anyone else. Much more than half Henry Reynold’s article on ‘History’ concerns the nineteenth century.

There are faults of omission. The elaborate cross-referencing, which will be of much more use to users of the electronic version of the encyclopaedia, sometimes breaks down. Neither the Myall Creek nor Cullinlaringo massacres are cross-referenced under the main entry ‘Massacres’, and Waterloo Creek does not receive an entry at all.

Horton chose a number of interesting strategies. One is that all the state entries such as ‘Tasmania’ would be written by indigenous people. Another is that controversial topics, such as ‘Politics’, would also be written by Aboriginal/Islander people.

Under this heading are three lively entries, the first by Charles Perkins. No sympathetic non-Aborigine could be so politically incorrect as to describe the 1,200 Aboriginal organisations supported by the federal government in this way: ‘many have lost their commitment, drifting from one budget allocation to the next and acting in collusion with other agencies.’ Michael Mansell follows with ‘The Politics of Language’, in which he berates the Encyclopaedia itself, inter alia, for using the term ‘Aboriginal Australians’ instead of ‘Australian Aborigines’. By the former term, he argues, ‘it follows that land rights, sovereignty and better treatment of any kind come not as a right but as a privilege for being a particular class of Australian’.

Kevin Gilbert observes, in the ‘Politics of Literature’, that there are among Aboriginal writers ‘no ersatz derivatives from the Greek world of legend, no Italian heroes needed to pad our prose, nor fauns and nymphs from the Old World, and no colonial pretensions’.

It is stimulating to read these polemical but thoughtful pieces, uncharacteristic of traditional encyclopaedias though they are. I can only regret, as probably does the editing team, that there were no Aboriginal specialists available for other large entries such as ‘Economy’. Many of the other Aboriginal /Islander writers have their own barrows to push. Eve Fesl, while noting that the word ‘Koori’ does not replace the names individual people use for themselves, tries a little cultural colonisation of her own in referring to the whole of Aboriginal Australia in this way.

A more doubtful policy was to include the Secretaries of the Commonwealth Department for Aboriginal Affairs, so that relative or complete obscurities such as John Taylor and Sir David Hay have their two or three line entries, while much more prominent Aborigines such as Coral Edwards, a founder of Link-Up, Malcolm Smith, the subject of a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody enquiry, and Ossie Cruse, another prominent NSW Koori, all deserving of an entry, do not appear under their own names.

The policy of ‘presenting an Australia with no white people except as they impinge on Aboriginal society’ has some singular results. Prominent non-Aborigines who did ‘impinge’ are John Mulvaney, Bob Dixon and Henry Reynolds. None has a subject entry, which is odd indeed. They ought to, not because they wrote books about prehistory, linguistics and history, but because their writing radically altered the discourse of Aboriginality in which everyone, including Aborigines, now participates. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Reynolds invented the frontier in his writings in the 1970s, nor, which is equally to the point, that every Aboriginal intellectual has been affected by his writings in their own construction of Aboriginal history. We have read about, and discussed, ‘the frontier’ for so long that we are apt to forget that it was an abstraction, an intellectual construction which now is beginning to look rather dated.

No Aboriginal linguist studies Australian languages but within the conceptual framework established by Dixon and some of his distinguished predecessors. All Aboriginal and non-­Aboriginal prehistorians are enormously affected (though they may not realise it) by the revolution in the perception of antiquity begun by Mulvaney. Aboriginality is not a given, even for an instant; like every other aspect of human society it builds upon the discourse of its members. Changing, it changes itself, the words, thoughts, and perceptions of its members and observers; it prefigures the future. There is no useful purpose served in pretending that ‘Aboriginality’ is something which non­-Aborigines only write about. For better or worse, their role has been crucial in creating Aboriginality, that which is lived by the indigenous, and perceived and interacted with by the non-indigenous.

But it is really exciting to have Aboriginal voices writing on subjects about which they care passionately. I suppose it would be invidious for the editors to have to asterisk all the indigenous writers. It will require some specialist know ledge to know who, among the 200-odd contributors, is in fact Aboriginal/Islander, and students who want to be able to understand and discuss indigenous writers will have to be guided by the ‘we’ which many of them manage to slip in somewhere.

This enormous work is not ‘just another encyclopaedia’. Is it useful then? Certainly. Horton’s rather daring gamble will work well for the general reader and for students. I imagine that indigenous organisations who can afford to buy the encyclopaedia will do so. It is important to remember, too, just how ignorant mainstream Australia is of almost everything Aboriginal. It will be immensely useful for the non-indigenous all over the country to look up the name of their local tribe or language group, and individuals or topics such as the Mabo decision, the Aboriginal Legal Service, Land Rights, Imparja Television, Shame, Language Evolution, Ken Colbung or Marcia Langton.

Until this publication it was extremely difficult for general readers even to know where the information on most of these topics might be found. The layout is attractive. There are hundreds of illustrations, all, no doubt, used with permission, and, where possible, with almost every recognisable individual named. This is ethical as well as political correctness, and should be an example to many other authors and publishers. The re-drawn maps of local Aboriginal boundaries (now with fuzzy edges) are a considerable advance on the dated version of Norman Tindale.

The feeling gained from the Encyclopaedia is one of rejoicing that the indigenous and non-indigenous have something to be proud of in their achievement. The Encyclopaedia is something to be proud of also.