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Tasmanian Literary Awards

Truth-Telling: history, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement by Henry Reynolds (NewSouth)

Winner People's Choice Awards 2022 Badge

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Truth-Telling

Inspired by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and its statement that sovereignty ‘has never been ceded or extinguished’, influential historian Henry Reynolds revisits the very premise of the settlement of Australia and challenges us to do the same. What if the sovereignty of Australia’s First Nations was recognised by European international law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What if the audacious British annexation of a whole continent was not seen as acceptable at the time and the colonial office in Britain understood that ‘peaceful settlement’ was a fiction? Henry Reynolds pulls the rug from under legal and historical assumptions in a book that’s about the present as much as the past. Truth-Telling shows exactly why our national war memorial must acknowledge the frontier wars, why we must change the date of our national day, and why treaties are important. Most of all, it makes urgently clear that the Uluru Statement is no rhetorical flourish but carries the weight of history and law and gives us a map for the future.

Read an extract from the book

Author's Biography

Henry Reynolds is one of Australia’s best-known historians. He grew up in Hobart and was educated at Hobart High School and the University of Tasmania. His pioneering work has changed the way we see the intertwining of black and white history in Australia. His most recent books are Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement and Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader & Tasmanian War Hero (as co-author).