The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania

University of Queensland Press author Dr Nicholas Clements will launch his historical book The Black War in Brisbane this Thursday night (October 23).

Dr Clements will speak on his work, which examines Australia’s social history, at the Avid Reader, Boundary Rd, West End from 6pm. Register here.

 The Black War ‘is an important book for the whole of Australia and for anyone with an interest in our national story.’ Henry Reynolds – Foreword, The Black War

Between 1824 and 1831, at least 218 colonists and some 600 Aborigines died violently in eastern Tasmania. The “Black War”, as it became known, was the most intense frontier conflict in Australia’s history, yet many Australians have never heard of it.

The Black War, by Nicholas Clements, is a groundbreaking new book that distinguishes itself starkly from other histories of the Australian frontier. It is the first social history. It resists the lofty legal and moral debates that have traditionally preoccupied historians, and instead focuses on the attitudes, experiences and actions of those involved first-hand.

Most significantly, The Black War cuts explicitly through the polemics of the “History Wars”, and in doing so has, as Henry Reynolds asserts, “brought them to an end”. By writing half of each chapter from the colonists’ perspectives, and half from the Aborigines’, Clements blurs the line between victim and villain, and with it, the certainties of our historical judgment.

The Black War is a gritty and deeply human account, detailing raw personal testimonies that bring to life the tribes, families and individuals involved as they struggled to survive one of the darkest periods of Australia’s past.

Through painstaking research, Clements empathetically reconstructs the day-to-day realities on both sides of this harrowing conflict. By exposing newly discovered writings and revisiting forgotten archival material, he has produced the most comprehensive history of the conflict to date.

As compelling as it is intriguing, The Black War is the must-read story of two peoples who just wanted to be free of each other – peoples more unalike than any humans who had ever met. Theirs is a legacy of acrimony and distrust that reverberates to the present day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Nicholas Clements is an eighth generation Tasmanian whose convict descendants lived through and participated in the war. An honorary research associate at the University of Tasmania, he is also an avid rock climber and bushwalker, whose passion for island’s landscape and history inspired him to write The Black War.

Media: UQP’s Meredene Hill, 07 3346 7932, 0401 575 143, meredeneh@uqp.uq.edu.au