The Good Country

Lucid, scrupulous scholarship at its best. Attwood sets high standards for historical truth-telling of a sort immediately relevant today.

Avoiding big-picture generalisations, Bain Attwood has written a succinct and excellent close-grained study of the Djadja Wurrung people and their interactions with settlers and the Aboriginal Protectorate.

This is … a deep local history that pays attention to the forces of time and place to explore how colonial relations evolved as they did in this region, and how Aboriginal people responded to the successive colonial processes of dispossession, institutionalisation, and assimilation.

Once you have this broad picture of, first, the Aboriginal nations’ territory, then the overlay of the settlers’ claims, you begin to see the land differently.

Concise, focused on places and people and alert to the historiography … exemplary in every way.

It is in his attentiveness to the finer textures of frontier relations that Attwood’s book really shines.

Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University and has held fellowships at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. In 2010 his book Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History won the Ernest Scott Prize for the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or colonial history. He has written many books, including the acclaimed biography William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story, about the inspirational Aboriginal leader William Cooper, and co-edited Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand and Protection and Empire: A Global History.