Joseph Lycett's water colour, circa 1817 depicts Aborigines using fire to hunt kangaroos.
Joseph Lycett's water colour, circa 1817 depicts Aborigines using fire to hunt kangaroos. Photo: National Library of Australia
Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia,
Viking, $49.99.
In 2001, in a newspaper obituary for the storyteller Patsy Adam Smith, I wondered who might be her successor as our most popular historical writer. I observed that it could not be Geoffrey Blainey whom, I casually suggested, had "hung up his boots". I then worked at the Australian War Memorial and Professor Blainey had ably chaired our committee that oversaw Craig Wilcox writing the quasi-official centenary history– or rather watched in admiration as  Wilcox produced what became the superbAustralia's Boer War. Geoff Blainey made a notable contribution to that project, deploying his command of late-colonial history to good advisory effect.
Blainey – then just 61 – had not hung up his boots in any way. I now surmise he had mentioned at a meeting feeling a little weary, and I took this to mean that he contemplated taking up nothing more strenuous than bowls. It was an absurd misjudgment. He then went on to publish not only Black Kettle & Full Moon – mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the Australia before ours – but also a book on Captain Cook and his Rivals and "short histories" of Victoria, the 20th Century, Christianity and, ahem, the World: hardly the work of someone preferring to potter about in slippers. This review gives me the opportunity to acknowledge my gaffe publicly as I have privately.
<i>The Story of Australia's People</i>, by Geoffrey Blainey.
The Story of Australia's People, by Geoffrey Blainey. Photo: Jason Steger
And he's still at it, having now published the absorbing and important The Story of Australia's People, sub-titled The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia, the first volume of an ambitious projected trilogy on the peopling of this continent from its human origins to our own day.
 
Blainey has produced a book that all Australians could and, dare I say it, should read. (Starting with our prime minister, who might then make fewer appalling gaffes, such as voicing the contemptible view that living in their own country constitutes for indigenous people a "lifestyle choice". If it was a choice it was made thousands of years ago.) 
This volume takes the reader on a sweeping journey, starting with theaudacious crossings of the narrow channels that separated Australia from Asia 60-odd thousand years ago and ending in the 1850s with British settlers occupying, amid tragic depopulation and suffering, the lands of the peoples who had made this land home for several thousand generations.
In between, Blainey deals entrancingly with the origins and life of Australia's Aborigines and with how Europeans settled and won the new land. Because he is basically an economic historian he emphases the interplay of environment and the physicality of life: this is not just another collection of "stories". Blainey shows that writers of good popular history don't have to depend on shouted stories to engage us and make us think.
This might seem vaguely familiar. Didn't he write The Triumph of the Nomads 40 years ago? Yes, and he followed it in 1980 with A Land Half Won, about the first decades of settlement. Is this a con? Is he just re-releasing those two books with new maps and a new cover?
No: this is no mere re-hash. What Blainey does here – and this is the clue to the intellectual excitement this book offers – is to go back and re-examine his earlier books in the light of later research. It is this reflection on his earlier work and his explicit and honest weighing up and revision that makes reading The Story of Australia's People such a joy.
He repeatedly refers to later scholarship that changed, added to or utterly over-turned what he and others thought. On the questions such as the date of the first arrivals, the extinction of mega-fauna, responses to changing climates: all is informed by his absorption of and reflection on later work. Often he says (in effect) "whoops!" and sometimes "guessed right!" – because he was working in the infancy of indigenous and environmental history.
Only one aspect disappointed (well, two – he uses "utilises" – a bad word). Blaineyquotes the work of archaeologist Dr Mike Smith, my former colleague at the National Museum of Australia.    He refers to Smith's  work on the co-existence of indigenous people and the giant bird genyornis, but he does not draw on Smith's monumental Archaeology of Australia's Deserts – I suppose it appeared too late to be included.  Smith's  commanding scholarship supports Blainey's revisionism.
In Australia "revisionist" is usually addressed to an historian as an insult, as if changing your mind in the light of the evidence is somehow reprehensible rather than an historian's duty. Blainey shows that even John Howard's supposed court historian has a greater loyalty to evidence than to ideology. 
For example, Blainey shows not only that indigenous groups fought demographically disastrous battles between themselves  (an interpretation uncongenial to those who would rather see Aboriginal societies as inherently peaceable), but he also challenges unjustified, conservative views of Australia's past. He describes the reality of Aboriginal resistance, of bloody, exterminating war on the pastoral frontier, reaching very similar conclusions to another distinguished historian of white-black relations, Henry Reynolds. 
That Australia's most respected conservative historian reaffirms his belief that a frontier war accompanied British settlement should give pause to those who deny it happened.
Having burned my fingers once I am not going to speculate rashly about what Geoff Blainey may write next. But I very much look forward to the next instalment of his bold, rich, wise, wry, authoritative and questioning trilogy.