A connected story of Cooper’s life has not hitherto been told, certainly not in such detail or backed by such deep and persistent archival research as Bain Attwood presents in this book. To write that connected story is no easy task, and indeed Attwood declares at the outset that to write a biography in the conventional sense is not his aim. Even such basic genealogical details as birth and parentage are elusive; Attwood’s research here does more to throw doubt upon accepted versions than to provide verified alternatives. More importantly, Attwood argues that the biographical mode is an inappropriate genre for telling the story of an Aboriginal person, since it tends (he says) to render its subject as unique and disconnected from the lives of others. Cooper was ‘a remarkable man’, but Attwood’s primary objective is not so much to trace the emergence of his distinctive activism as to argue that his political work was a product of his history, his broad network of family, kin, and community, and his historical experience as a dispossessed Aboriginal man, witnessing and experiencing injustice and bureaucratic neglect but forging new communities at the Maloga Mission and the Cumeroogunga Reserve.

Cooper’s name, moreover, disappears from the archival trail for years at a time, so that his life story must be deduced and evoked in large part by reference to its surrounding context. This history, too, is constructed from fragmentary records, with the effect that time moves at an uneven pace through the book. A few weeks of incident and record may occupy many pages, a decade or more slide by in the space of a sentence. Given this, I would have appreciated some firmer reminders of how the chronology of Cooper’s own life mapped onto the wider story. Locational markers – as simple as a reminder of his age, residence, or family situation each time he returns to the story – would help the reader keep track of unfolding events and their significance for Cooper. Still more would I have appreciated a few ongoing reminders of the nature of his relationship with other players in this history, a more cohesive sense of how and when their lives met and meshed. Attwood has skilfully pieced together a complex story out of tiny fragments. But perhaps because biography is not his aim, or perhaps simply because the main events of the story are so familiar to him, he sometimes neglects to fill possible blanks in his readers’ knowledge.

Nonetheless, it is greatly to Attwood’s credit that in the face of this fragmentary record we never completely lose sight of Cooper, never forget that even when unrecorded he remained an active presence in the life of his community. Where records do exist, however fleeting, or when memory fills the gap, Cooper leaps vividly into view. We see him as a child, watching a boy of his own age reading aloud in a hotel, and determining that he too would learn to read ‘and do better than the boy did’; later, under the appreciative gaze of missionary Daniel Matthews, he learns his letters in just three days and immediately passes this valued knowledge on to his little brother. We see him in adulthood, undergoing a conversion to Christianity with a conviction and faith that would endure throughout his life; pressing his claim to a parcel of Cumeroogunga land, the right to cultivate it and pass it on to his children; tragically losing two wives and several children to disease in the unsanitary conditions of the reserve. We see him in old age, boldly moving to Melbourne when in his seventies and embarking on a life of activism on behalf of Aboriginal people across Australia; walking everywhere to save his limited means for his cause; indefatigably seeking out signatures to his petition; writing letter after letter, while complaining of the fatigue of doing so; ‘sticking to’ his great-nephew Doug Nicholls and persistently urging him to make use of his celebrity and ‘start wobbling your tongue on behalf of your own people’. Through the experiences of his long life, Cooper developed the wisdom and the will to push for justice for Aboriginal people. In his old age, he pushed hardest and most eloquently, but in growing despair recognised that the injustices would not be undone in his lifetime.

I have no quarrel with Attwood’s desire to ground our understanding of Cooper’s thoughts and actions in his history, networks, families, and communities, nor with his insistence that Cooper did not work single-handed, though in my view such an aim is entirely consistent with the genre of biography. But in arguing so forcibly that Cooper was not a sole agent, and that the shape of his thinking owed much to his teachers and mentors, Attwood runs the risk of diminishing Cooper’s own voice and perhaps forgetting that influence can flow in more than one direction. At times, too, his argument seems to depend on mere assertion – notably that Cooper’s early letters and petitions were written, in part or in full, by his brother-in-law Thomas Shadrach James and therefore bear the imprint of James’s thinking. I wanted to know more about the archival basis for this assertion: without more discussion, I was forced to wonder if Attwood was too readily conflating handwriting with authorship. If not, and given the persistent repetition of such claims, I felt the book demanded a more nuanced discussion of the nature of collaboration, the nature of authorship, or the entanglement of literacy and orality, history and power, in the emergence of a distinctive Aboriginal voice.

Attwood opens his book on a somewhat defensive note, asserting that it is written ‘within a particular intellectual tradition, namely the academic discipline of history’, which according to him means placing ‘great store’ on records created at the time. Here he reaches for the authority of his discipline to explain why the stories he tells may differ from those that exist in oral tradition, but the claim that academic historians place faith in archival records as ‘the most reliable sources of knowledge about that particular time’ strikes an oddly conservative note. So, too, does Attwood’s own authorial voice. Most academic historians of our generation are willing to place their own process of reasoning on display, rather than demand that it be accepted without question. Attwood’s declarative assertions of the ‘truths’ contained in archival records seldom acknowledge that all history is necessarily a partial and cautious interpretation of incomplete fragments. He seems reluctant to acknowledge those moments when his archives lack authority – when they are too elliptical, too obscure, too fragmented, too silent, too absent to allow for anything but cautious, qualified inference. He seems more reluctant still to describe or explain his own process of inference in ways that might leave it open to questioning or refinement.

Nonetheless, and perhaps paradoxically, he has produced a powerful book, which I would unequivocally describe as a biography, and a fitting tribute to Cooper’s life and activism. Although he was a skilled and moving speaker, few words of Cooper’s authorship survive in text, and those few, as Attwood insistently reminds us, are the product of a rich history and a collaborative world as much as of individual genius. Yet the strongest impression left by this book is of a voice both eloquent and persistent: sometimes persuasive and full of hope, sometimes filled with anger and bitter disappointment, always driven by a profound vision of justice and moral uplift. It is Cooper’s voice that lingers long after the book is closed.