Bain Attwood

Bain Attwood has published extensively in the history of colonialism. His sole authored books include The Making of the Aborigines (1989), Rights for Aborigines (2003), Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History (2005), Possession: Batman's Treaty and the Matter of History (2009), Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People (2020), and William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story (2021). He is jointly responsible for Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League (2004) and The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution (2007). He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays, including Protection and Empire: A Global History (2017).  He collaborated with Anne Scrimgeour to create a major website on the Pilbara Aboriginal strike: https://pilbarastrike.org/. He has held fellowships at the Australian National University (2001-03) and Cambridge University (2007-08), and the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies (2014-15). Bain has also undertaken work for the National Museum of Australia and written on indigenous history for newspapers. His ninth monograph, 'A Bloody Difficult Subject': Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History, was published in 2023. He is currently working on a project about denial and Australia's black history, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

I welcome students wishing to undertake theses in the fields of indigenous history, history and memory, and public history.