That loss has profound moral implications for understanding the invasion experience. Any kind of travel to those worlds calls for a particular effort of moral imagination. However, the journey, at least for the non-Indigenous, has begun to be mapped over the past thirty years. First, there was the High Court’s 1993 judgment on the question of native land title in Australia, which brought traditional Indigenous possession within the reach of the Common Law. In Mabo’s aftermath, Tim Rowse offered in Meanjin (1994, volume 52) an important argument about its implications beyond land rights and for Australian ‘moral community’ as a whole. This he defined as ‘a dimension of the imagined community that is nationhood’s cultural basis’. In the wake of Mabo, he said, the nation’s moral community ‘must be re-created in speech, writing and action’, a process involving ‘both moral and practical reasoning about the coexistence of settler and indigenous cultures’. These things take time, but in 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart offered another vital clue, with its sketch of the ‘ancient sovereignty’ of the First Nations ‘[shining] through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’. That declaration seemed to match and balance Mabo.

‘Sovereignty’ is a word rich enough to feed a century of history writing. Altogether then, the Uluru Statement is an invitation to Australian historians to move beyond the increasingly impoverished nationalism characteristic of much historical writing, left or right, since the 1960s. Collective sovereignty grows from individual sovereignty; the two are best explored together. On top of that, Indigenous sovereignty is hard to reconcile in any thoroughgoing way with older history-writing. Such ancient sovereignty, as I understand it, is really timeless sovereignty, and history-writing, as practised so far, is all about time. This is where Karskens does so well. She explores sovereignty within circumstance – intimate, tangible, and spiritual – combined so as to draw together time and timelessness. In short, People of the River is a marvellous pioneering effort.

 Nepean River, Yarramundi Reserve flood waters, January 2016. Named after Yarramundi, an Indigenous Australian of the Boorooberongal clan of the Darug People. (Rosie Nicolai/Flickr)

Since the 1990s, frontiers of invasion have been reimagined as contact zones, spaces of coexistence, in Rowse’s words, characterised by violence but also by other interactions, complex and contradictory, between invaders and Indigenous people. This was the line taken by the High Court judgment in Wik (1996), which gave legal basis to the shared use of land, pastoral and Indigenous, in certain places. It is also in line with the dwindling of moral absolutism, the stark and sweeping moral assessments that have hitherto characterised many accounts of the invasion process. People of the River is a highly detailed attempt to understand the implications for one important contact zone. In combating moral absolutism, Karskens also makes a point of proving the continuous existence of Indigenous life and attachment, through invasion and beyond.

‘We can only begin to grasp … the human story of the contact zone,’ Karskens says, ‘by recognising the interlaced nature of the events, places, actions and words that were recorded, and by interrogating, as best we can, the evasions and silences in the records.’ Place is a crucial ingredient because, as Karskens says, by grounding events in place instead of ‘extracting and abstracting’ them from place, their deeper significance emerges. Ultimately, too, it is not place she means but the perception of place and human connection with place, including, of course, Indigenous connection with Country. In this book, everything keeps coming back to place. There are several useful maps, but taken as a whole the hard-and-fast truth offered by maps fades before the slippery manifold truths found in daily understanding.

In Karskens’s contact zone, people deal with each other in an infinite variety of ways. Two chapters deal specifically with the details of family life, one for the immigrants and the other for the Indigenous peoples of the river. Among the settlers, the generational cycle of marriage and childbirth drew many disparate individuals – free immigrants, former soldiers, and ex-convicts, and then the locally born – into ‘one people’. Part of the argument here is statistical, making use of church marriage records, so as to show how this interweaving happened, but the story as a whole depends on deft movement backwards and forwards between the general and the particular, between customary behaviour, which can be fairly obvious, and the deeply felt needs and obligations of named individuals, which are usually much harder to make out. The tracing of individual lives over many years is central to the method. It works so well partly because everything is small in scale.

Karskens’s account of Indigenous family life is very different, because, on the contrary, it is a story of relationships destroyed and networks broken up. Murder is part of the story, especially in the early years. So is the separation of children from their parents, exemplified by Governor Macquarie’s Native Institution at Parramatta, where Indigenous children, some from the Hawkesbury, were educated. The emotions of parents whose children were there at the beginning seem mixed, and the reader might wonder how much of their grief was due to the initial separation and how much to the realisation over time that children taken in this way might be lost altogether.

Among the settler population, such separation was common. Governor King and his wife left children in England, and John and Elizabeth Macarthur sent all their sons off at about seven years old. This was deliberate planning, in which prudence, including the need for education, took priority over feeling, just as it often did in the choice of marriage partners. Through separation, settler parents retained control of families and culture, but then they imposed a radical break on Indigenous parents. If sovereignty is a question affecting all aspects of life, this was another invasion of sovereignty, but Indigenous parents might not have seen straightaway what they were losing.

The overall shape of the book points to its deeper purpose. It starts with a detailed summary of local archaeological research, proving a range of pre-invasion activity unusually varied for such a small area, with a good deal of adaptation and invention over the long term. The river was a source of abundance, especially yams and fish, and throughout the area as a whole there are clear signs of ceremonial performance, tool manufacturing, and creative activity, especially rock art. Karskens draws this mass of detail into an ethnographic pattern, so that ancient sovereignty shines through clearly.

The same sort of thing happens at the end of the book, but on a different key. The archaeological material has shown the landscape as a repository of power and knowledge, and of that there are constant reminders throughout the book. So far it has been mostly determined by the river, but towards the end the reader is drawn into the deep maze of the hills that overshadow the river, the Blue Mountains, whose vast intricacies dumbfounded all comers. Karskens’s story as a whole stresses the shared humanity of black and white, and nothing could make the point more strongly than the way that the mountains affected them all.

So Karskens moves finally to outline the impact of invasion on deeper existential understanding among the First Peoples. We have been shown, as she says, an ‘astonishing sacred landscape’, obvious in ‘repeated patterns of sighting, sightlines, sequences and motifs’. She links this landscape to the historical evidence in order to show how belief evolved to deal with the shock of invasion. It is a remarkable story in itself, wonderfully new. We are left with the awe-inspiring image of the eagle of the mountains, fixed on rock face and hovering over Country, pinpointing Grace Karskens’s overall portrayal, her method and singular achievement.