Tongerlongeter is an epic story of resistance, sorrow and survival. Leader of the Oyster Bay nation of south-east Tasmania in the 1820s and ’30s, Tongerlongeter and his allies prosecuted the most effective frontier resistance ever mounted on Australian soil, inflicting some 354 casualties. His brilliant campaign inspired terror throughout the colony, and he represented a beacon of hope in a hopeless situation for Tasmanian aboriginal people of the time.

James Erskine Calder, Tasmania’s Surveyor General from 1859 to 1870, lived through the violence and conflict of early colonial Van Diemen’s Land, often in direct contact with First Nations peoples. Uncommonly, he was one of the few public voices calling for his countrymen to understand Tasmanian Indigenous peoples not as ‘savages’ but as human beings. His important writings have been revived once more, published as The Native Tribes of Tasmania, with an enlightening new foreword by Henry Reynolds.

Professor Henry Reynolds is one of Australia’s most recognised and respected historians. He is the author of over 14 books, including co-authoring Tongerlongeter, and his pioneering work has changed the way we see the intertwining of black and white history in Australia.

Nicholas Clements is an adjunct researcher at the University of Tasmania, where he completed his PhD on the island’s Aboriginal and early contact histories. He is the author The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania, and co-author of Tongerlongeter.

Cassandra Pybus is a distinguished historian, and the award-winning author of 12 books including Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse. She is distantly descended from from J.E. Calder himself.