Henry Reynolds is considered one of the nation’s leading authorities on the history of Australia’s Indigenous people.
Henry spent most of his academic career at James Cook University at Townsville before returning to Tasmania twenty years ago. Living in the north alerted him to the many aspects of Australia’s past which had disappeared from the history books. His ground-breaking work, The Other Side of the Frontier (1982) which won the Ernest Scott Prize, examines Aboriginal responses to British colonisation, including the issues of guerilla warfare and the exploitation of Aboriginal women.
Reynolds’s primary research interest has been the history of Aboriginal-white relations in Australia and his publications include Frontier (1987), Dispossession (1989), The Law of the Land (1987), With the White People (1990), Fate of a Free People (1995), Aboriginal Sovereignty (1996) and Why Weren’t We Told? (2000).
Henry is notable for arguing for justice for Aboriginal land rights; his work with Eddie Mabo on an oral history project in the 1970s contributed to the High Court’s recognition of these rights.
