These 1999 Boyer Lectures, tackling the history of relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the shadow of the then government's derision of 'black armband history', are passionate, particular, complex and challenging. Their author makes me think of that poem beloved of feminists in the seventies that starts 'When I am an old woman I shall wear purple'. Some time in the 1990s, after working for decades as a meticulous historian of the Aztecs and Mayans, she had a major health crisis and while she was recovering began to write for an audience beyond the academy. I can't imagine a better introductory survey than this of the history of contact on this continent -- not because it gives a rundown of the key dates and events (it doesn't), but because it presents a handful of true stories to hold up against the muddled impressions most of us whites have about the realities of Aboriginal history since 1788, and probes those stories for what they reveal about our shared history. I have no idea how Inga Clendinnen is regarded by other historians, but her method of assembling her evidence and then, making it clear where her sympathies and predilections lie, making her guesses about its meaning is, to me, tremendously beguiling. She leaves her readers plenty of room to disagree, but is at the same time very persuasive.