Henry Reynolds (historian)
Encyclopedia
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....

.

Education and career

Reynolds received a state school education in Hobart
Hobart
Hobart is the state capital and most populous city of the Australian island state of Tasmania. Founded in 1804 as a penal colony,Hobart is Australia's second oldest capital city after Sydney. In 2009, the city had a greater area population of approximately 212,019. A resident of Hobart is known as...

, Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...

 from 1944 to 1954, followed by attendance at the University of Tasmania
University of Tasmania
The University of Tasmania is a medium-sized public Australian university based in Tasmania, Australia. Officially founded on 1 January 1890, it was the fourth university to be established in nineteenth-century Australia...

 to gain his Masters in Arts degree, then taught in secondary schools in Australia and England. He returned to Australia in 1964, accepting a post as lecturer and to set up the programme in Australian History at Townsville University College, now known as James Cook University
James Cook University
James Cook University is a public university based in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. The university has two Australian campuses, located in Townsville and Cairns respectively, and an international campus in Singapore. JCU is the second oldest university in Queensland—proclaimed in 1970—and the...

. He gained his doctorate in history from James Cook University, and was later Associate Professor of History and Politics at the University from 1982 until retiring from there in 1998. He then took up an Australian Research Council post at the University of Tasmania in Launceston, and subsequently a post at Riawunna, the Centre for Aboriginal Education of the University of Tasmania

Henry Reynolds is married to Margaret Reynolds
Margaret Reynolds
Margaret Reynolds served as an Australian Labor Party Senator for Queensland from 1983 to 1999.Reynolds had two ministerial appointments during her time in the Senate, serving as Minister for Local Government from September 1987 to April 1990 and as Minister assisting the Prime Minister for the...

, an ALP
Australian Labor Party
The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...

 Senator for Queensland in Federal Parliament (1983 until 1999).

Historical research

In more than ten books and numerous academic articles Reynolds has researched and explained what he sees as the high level of violence and conflict involved in the colonisation of Australia, and the aboriginal resistance that resulted in numerous massacres of indigenous people. Reynolds, and other historians, estimate that up to 3,000 Europeans and 20,000 indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....

 were killed directly in the frontier violence
Australian frontier wars
The Australian frontier wars were a series of conflicts fought between Indigenous Australians and European settlers. The first fighting took place in May 1788 and the last clashes occurred in the early 1930s. Indigenous fatalities from the fighting have been estimated as at least 20,000 and...

, and many more Aborigines died indirectly through the introduction of European diseases and starvation caused by being forced from their productive tribal lands.

Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...

 and Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...

 categorise his approach as a 'black armband view' of Australian history.

In 2002 historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...

, in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, disputed whether the colonial settlers of Australia committed widespread genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

 against Indigenous Australians, especially focussing on the Black War
Black War
The Black War is a term used to describe a period of conflict between British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in the early nineteenth century...

 in Tasmania, and denied the claims by historians such as Reynolds and Professor Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan is an Australian academic. She has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle...

 that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. He went further to accuse Reynolds of inventing evidence and making many claims without any documentary support at all.

Friendship with Eddie Mabo

Reynolds was on friendly terms with Eddie Mabo
Eddie Mabo
Eddie Koiki Mabo was a Torres Strait Islander who is known for his role in campaigning for Indigenous land rights and for his role in a landmark decision of the High Court of Australia that overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius which characterised Australian law with regards to land and...

, and, in his book Why Weren't We Told?, describes the talks they had regarding Mabo's people's rights to their lands, on Murray Island, in the Torres Strait
Torres Strait
The Torres Strait is a body of water which lies between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. It is approximately wide at its narrowest extent. To the south is Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost continental extremity of the Australian state of Queensland...

. Reynolds writes:
"Eddie [...] would often talk about his village and about his own land, which he assured us would always be there when he returned because everyone knew it belonged to his family. His face shone when he talked of his village and his land.


So intense and so obvious was his attachment to his land that I began to worry about whether he had any idea at all about his legal circumstances. [...] I said something like: 'You know how you've been telling us about your land and how everyone knows it's Mabo land? Don't you realise that nobody actually owns land on Murray Island
Terra nullius
Terra nullius is a Latin expression deriving from Roman law meaning "land belonging to no one" , which is used in international law to describe territory which has never been subject to the sovereignty of any state, or over which any prior sovereign has expressly or implicitly relinquished...

? It's all crown land.'


He was stunned. [...] How could the whitefellas question something so obvious as his ownership of his land?"


Reynolds looked into the issue of indigenous land ownership in international law, and encouraged Mabo to take the matter to court. "It was there over the sandwiches and tea that the first step was taken which led to the Mabo judgement in June 1992
Mabo v Queensland
Mabo v Queensland was a landmark High Court of Australia decision recognising native title in Australia for the first time...

." Mabo then talked to lawyers, and Reynolds "had little to do with the case itself from that time", although he and Mabo remained friends until the latter's death in January 1992.

Awards and honours

Henry Reynolds has received the following awards and honours:
  • 1970–71 British Council
    British Council
    The British Council is a United Kingdom-based organisation specialising in international educational and cultural opportunities. It is registered as a charity both in England and Wales, and in Scotland...

     Travelling Scholarship
  • 1982 Ernest Scott Historical Prize for The other side of the frontier
    The Other Side of the Frontier
    The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European invasion of Australia is a history book published in 1981 by Australian historian Henry Reynolds...

  • 1986 Harold White Fellowship, National Library of Australia
    National Library of Australia
    The National Library of Australia is the largest reference library of Australia, responsible under the terms of the National Library Act for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the...

  • 1988 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
    Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
    The Australian Human Rights Commission is a national human rights institution, a statutory body funded by, but operating independently of, the Australian Government. It has the responsibility for investigating alleged infringements under Australia’s anti-discrimination legislation...

     Arts Award for The law of the land
  • 1996 Australian Book Council Award: the Banjo Award for non-fiction
  • 2000 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Literary Work Advancing Public Debate – the Harry Williams Award for Why Weren't We Told?
  • 2008 with Professor Marilyn Lake
    Marilyn Lake
    Marilyn Lake is an Australian historian known for her work on the effects of the military and war on Australian civil society, the political history of Australian women and Australian racism including the White Australia Policy and the movement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander human rights...

    , Queensland Premier's Literary Awards History Book Award for Drawing the Global Colour Line
  • 2009 with Marilyn Lake the non-fiction category of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards
    Prime Minister's Literary Awards
    The Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards were announced at the end of 2007 by the incoming Rudd Ministry following the 2007 election. They are administered by the Minister for the Arts....

     for Drawing the Global Colour Line

Major works

  • Aborigines and Settlers: the Australian Experience, 1788–1939 (ed) (1972)
  • The Other Side of the Frontier : Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia
    The Other Side of the Frontier
    The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European invasion of Australia is a history book published in 1981 by Australian historian Henry Reynolds...

     (1981) ISBN 0-14-022475-0
  • Frontier; Aborigines, Settlers and Land (1987) ISBN 0-04-994005-8
  • Dispossession; Black Australia and White Invaders (1989) ISBN 1-86448-141-2
  • With the White People (1990) ISBN 0-14-012834-4
  • Race Relations in North Queensland (1993) (ed) ISBN 0-86443-484-7
  • Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) ISBN 1-86373-969-6
  • This Whispering in Our Hearts (1998) ISBN 1-86448-581-7
  • Why Weren't We Told? (2000) ISBN 0-14-027842-7
  • Black Pioneers (2000) ISBN 0-14-029820-7
  • An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia's History (2001) ISBN 0-670-91220-4
  • The Law Of The Land (2003) ISBN 0-14-100642-0
  • Fate of a Free People (2004) ISBN 0-14-300237-6
  • Marilyn Lake
    Marilyn Lake
    Marilyn Lake is an Australian historian known for her work on the effects of the military and war on Australian civil society, the political history of Australian women and Australian racism including the White Australia Policy and the movement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander human rights...

     and Henry Reynolds (eds.), What's Wrong with ANZAC? The Militarisation of Australian History, Sydney, NewSouth Books, 2010. ISBN 9781742231518

External links

  • Papers of Henry Reynolds – MS 9548 at the National Library of Australia
    National Library of Australia
    The National Library of Australia is the largest reference library of Australia, responsible under the terms of the National Library Act for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the...

  • Henry Reynolds, ARC Senior Research Fellow, School of History & Classics at the University of Tasmania
    University of Tasmania
    The University of Tasmania is a medium-sized public Australian university based in Tasmania, Australia. Officially founded on 1 January 1890, it was the fourth university to be established in nineteenth-century Australia...

  • Aboriginal Sorcery with Professor Henry Reynolds Podcast interview on La Trobe University
    La Trobe University
    La Trobe University is a multi-campus university in Victoria, Australia. It was established in 1964 by an Act of Parliament to become the third oldest university in the state of Victoria. The main campus of La Trobe is located in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora; two other major campuses are...

    website.
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