Henry Reynolds - Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement

H ENRY R EYNOLDS is one of Australias most recognised historians. He grew up in Hobart and was educated at Hobart High School and the University of Tasmania. In 1965, he accepted a lectureship at James Cook University in Townsville, which sparked an interest in the history of relations between settlers and Aboriginal people. In 2000, he took up a professorial fellowship at the University of Tasmania. His pioneering work has changed the way we see the intertwining of black and white history in Australia. His books with NewSouth include The Other Side of the Frontier (reissue); Whats Wrong with Anzac? (as co-author); Forgotten War, which won the Victorian Premiers Literary Prize; Unnecessary Wars; and most recently This Whispering in Our Hearts Revisited.

Our goal of an honourable place in the nation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people owes much to Henry Reynolds. He contributed his profound historical scholarship on the denial of sovereignty to Indigenous people in Australia when we were still trying to get a seat at the table in the United Nations. He has been cited in key documents since and his work informed the outcomes in Koiki Mabos challenge to the High Court in Mabo (No 2). His imprint is also evident in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. This book is essential reading for everyone involved in recognising our place in the nation.

Marcia Langton

Henry Reynolds once again exposes some of the horrible truths regarding our shared past. Laying an important foundation for truth-telling and treaty-making, Truth-Telling casts aside the lie of terra nullius that continues to have disastrous and ongoing consequences for Aboriginal peoples, and for the contemporary Australian nation. This book will allow Australians to build a better, more truthful, Australia.

Mick Dodson

With passion, readability, and scrupulous scholarship, Henry Reynolds lays out the big-picture context of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and why its fundamental to our future Australia. Essential reading to understand the past and see the path forward.

Kate Grenville

This is the book weve been waiting for. The historian who pioneered a revolution in Aboriginal history helps us to understand the full majesty and historical depth of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. In doing so, he exposes the denial at the heart of Australias foundation. Henry Reynolds writes with luminous clarity, piercing insight and moral power. Truth-Telling is a gift to his nation from one of our greatest historians, a brilliant encapsulation of a lifetimes scholarship.

Tom Griffiths

An eloquent and powerful distillation of a lifetimes work. Ranging across a vast terrain of scholarship as few other historians can legal and political history, war and memory, and the brutal, chequered history of Australias frontier Henry Reynolds re-examines the traditional doctrine of sovereignty in light of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. How did the sovereignty of First Nations people survive the invasion? Is it possible for First Nations sovereignty to coexist with the sovereignty of the Crown? With trademark clarity and intellectual rigour, Reynolds has given us a political call to arms; a book that explains like no other why Truth-Telling is so urgently needed in Australia.

Mark McKenna

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this book contains words and descriptions written by non-Indigenous people in the past that may be confronting and would be considered inappropriate today. It also contains the names of deceased Indigenous people and graphic descriptions of historical events that may be disturbing to some readers.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

Henry Reynolds 2021

First published 2021

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN:9781742236940 (paperback)

9781742245119 (ebook)

9781742249636 (ePDF)

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Peter Long

Cover image The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770, Australia, 1930 / Copyright Percy Trompf Artistic Trust, courtesy Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from time immemorial, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or mother nature, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australias nationhood.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.