Stolen lands

Lindqvist has precision (footnotes, bibliography, historical nuggets). His prose is often beautiful. He has broad immersion in his journey’s sights and smells and rhythms. He has read widely and deeply about wherever he goes. He is, as ever, good on the lies Europeans tell themselves as they conquer and colonise.

Terra Nulliusis less self- consciously ‘arty’ than Exterminateand Bombing. It is designed to be read from beginning to end as a travelogue from Adelaide to Darwin, down the west coast of Australia and back across the Nullarbor plain. He avoids the major cities and instead exposes, with terrible and compelling clarity, the appalling crimes committed by the whites as they ‘civilised’ the ‘empty land’ they found, their kidnapping and murder often dressed up as benevolence.

Lindqvist shows how the Aborigines’ resistance was overcome by guns, legal trickery and alcohol. He shows how that resistance was disappeared down the memory hole, and this ‘lack of resistance’ then used to argue for the legitimacy of white rule. He shows how a few brave whites faced obloquy for their defence of Aboriginal rights. In the midst of a serious critique of the failings of western sociology and anthropology (Durkheim, Levi-Strauss and Freud emerge as buffoons), Lindqvist points out how intelligent and ingenious the Aborigines’ response to invasion and extermination could be. Losing to the west is no sign of stupidity. The book closes with incisive and clear thoughts on the nature of ‘historic debt’ and apology that should be tattooed inside John Howard’s eyelids. For anyone from Australia, for anyone who visits it, and just for anyone.