Books like The other side of the frontier by Reynolds, Henry

Bruce Chatwin’s *The Songlines* blends travelogue and cultural exploration as he journeys across Australia’s outback, seeking the meaning of Aboriginal dreaming tracks and the hidden pathways that map their ancient world.

In the creation of a new society there are always winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew through invasion, settlement and development, from a colonial outpost to an affluent industrial society. This book tells the history of Australia from the standpoint of those who were dispossessed, the original Australians. Surveying two centuries of Aboriginal-European encounters, it reveals what white Australia lost through unremitting colonial invasion and tells the story of Aboriginal survival through resistance and accommodation. It traces the Aboriginal journey from the margins of colonial society to a more central place in modern Australia. Aboriginal Australians first appeared in 1982 and has won wide readership. This new enlarged edition brings the story up to the mid-1990s. It remains the only concise and up-to-date survey of Aboriginal history since 1788.

In January 1788 the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales and a thousand British men and women encountered the people who would be their new neighbors. Dancing with Strangers tells the story of what happened between the first British settlers of Australia and the people they found living there. Inga Clendinnen offers a fresh reading of the earliest written sources, the reports, letters, and journals of the first British settlers in Australia. It reconstructs the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader 'Bennelong' (Baneelon); and then traces the painful destruction of that hard-won friendship. A distinguished and award-winning historian of the Spanish encounters with Aztec and Maya indians of sixteenth-century America, Clendinnen's analysis of early cultural interactions in Australia touches broader themes of recent historical debates: the perception of the Other, the meanings of culture, and the nature of colonialism and imperialism.