Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement

by Henry Reynolds

288 pp., NewSouth Publishing, 2021,

ISBN: 9781742236940 (pbk), $34.99,

Review by Anna Clark

University of Technology Sydney

Henry Reynolds has been truth-telling for the better part of 50 years. Books such as The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land (1987), This Whispering in Our Hearts (1998), An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (2001), and Forgotten War (2014), each reveal uncomfortable truths about Australia’s past, as well as the unevenness of its remembrance.

Although Reynolds is also the first to admit that his own historical reckoning was far from intuitive. In his 1998 memoir, Why Weren’t We Told?, Reynolds explains how his honours thesis celebrated the writings of radical nationalists such as Russel Ward. But that nonchalant, heroic trope was demolished when he began researching North Queensland history after moving there in the 1970s. Such truths confounded his understanding of Australia’s eminent historians. ‘How did Ward not see … the blood-stained hands?’ he wondered in disbelief.

In Truth-Telling: Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, Reynolds elaborates on that experience of being confronted by the overwhelming archival evidence of colonial murder, dispersal and retribution on the Queensland frontier. ‘For the first time I had the chance to see, vicariously, Australian history from the other side of the frontier,’ he explains. ‘And having done so I could never see again our national story as one of triumphant progress and peaceful pioneering’ (p. 6). Reynolds’s historical awakening, as he describes it, came from listening to voices from the archives and the community around him.

Truth-Telling is another act of listening – in this case it was prompted by a First Nations–led national political movement, as well as an overwhelming historical archive. Reynolds takes the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart as its starting point. That bold declaration of sovereignty and truth-telling by 200 Indigenous participants calls on the nation to recognise that sovereignty was never ceded, and that the truth of colonisation has to be recognised and understood.

The book is divided into those two themes explicitly. With a copy of the Uluru Statement reproduced as its starting point, Reynolds embarks on this important clarion call. At the heart of British claims to sovereignty over the Australian continent, Reynolds argues, is a glaring hypocrisy that cannot be resolved. The entire continent had been mapped, storied and governed for thousands of years before the British Empire even existed, and yet that occupation was ignored in the legal establishment of the British colonies. This ‘was no unpeopled land’, Reynolds insists (p. 31).

Even the early colonists recognised the inconsistency of their tenure: legal doctrines defined the country as wastelands and deserts, as Lisa Ford, Ann Curthoys and Jesse Mitchell have explored, yet the actual occupation of these lands was unquestionable. The ‘establishment of the small penal colony on Sydney Harbour gave absolutely no legitimacy to the British claim to half a continent, home to many Indigenous nations,’ Reynolds argues, ‘which had occupied their homelands for hundreds of generations’ (p. 25).

In the country’s north, where Reynolds found himself researching and teaching in the 1970s, that inconsistency was even more glaring. ‘While it seemed like a simple matter to describe how the new Commonwealth had acquired sovereignty, it was far more problematic to explain how the First Nations had lost it,’ he surmises (p. 245). As the Uluru Statement articulates, the sovereignty of Australia’s First Peoples ‘has never been ceded or extinguished’.

Over time, the legal fiction of British sovereignty also became a historical fiction, curated and advanced by the history discipline, taught in schools and written in history texts: Australia’s First Nations did not have conceptions of ownership; the colonists were heroic pioneers battling the elements and entitled to this country. So, despite the evidence in the archives, historians were complicit in this erasure of the truth: ‘The heroic pioneers had blood on their hands and notches on the sticks of their rifles’ (p. 80). But where was that truth in the history books? ‘Not everyone took part in the invasion of the territory of the First Nations,’ Reynolds acknowledged. ‘But the saga of settlement, growth and expansion became Queensland’s unifying narrative’ (p. 179).

Despite the increasing influence of research in this field, by historians such Reynolds, Raymond Evans, Robert Ørsted-Jensen, and others, as well as growing recognition of Indigenous historical accounts of the ‘Killing Times’, this historical lens has not been entirely replaced. The continued recognition of Australia Day on 26 January, in honour of the First Fleet’s arrival in Sydney Cove in 1788, is contemptuous of Aboriginal memory, Reynolds contends. As is the absence of memorials to Indigenous victims of the frontier wars. Meanwhile, commemoration of Australia’s overseas military expeditions continues its extraordinary renaissance, and has been publicly celebrated and promoted by successive federal governments.

Despite his criticism of such historical discrepancy and inequity, Reynolds still sees history as central to the truth-telling project. The discipline has policed ‘truth’ and narrated Australia’s colonisation at the expense of its First Peoples. But, despite its complicity with the colonisation, its silencing and occlusion, Reynolds also insists that history is vital for coming to terms with that past. Truth-Telling is ultimately an optimistic and patriotic project. Reynolds deliberately uses the collective pronouns of ‘we’ and ‘us’ to advocate for a more inclusive Australia throughout. History’s archives, texts and practitioners might have excluded First Nations histories and history-makers for most of the twentieth century, but Reynolds also sees them as essential to the task of reconciliation. ‘Truth-telling allows us to weave new stories and to make old ones richer while, at the same time, more complex’, he concludes (p. 199). It is an argument for a shared, just future.