Taking liberty: indigenous rights and settler self-government in colonial Australia, 1830-1890

At last a history that explains how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy.

The legacy of seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens.

It also shows how shifting wider imperial and colonial politics influenced the treatment of indigenous Australians, and how indigenous people began to engage in their own ways with these new political institutions.

It is, essentially, a bringing together of two histories that have hitherto been told separately.