This provocative study breaks new ground. It argues that, in a period dominated by the white Australia ideal, the nation's political leaders were content to allow disease and malnutrition, as well as punitive police raids, to ravage the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory, and that for decades there was a failure to provide funding to implement publicly announced policies. Written for a general readership, "Governing Savages" explains how such a state of affairs could arise and be tolerated in a professedly humane society. The result of almost a decade of research by one of the leading scholars in the field of Australian race relations, the book analyzes the attitudes of pastoralists, missionaries, administrators, judges and politicians and of those - including Aboriginal leaders - seeking to awaken the conscience of Australians and bring to an end generations of brutality and callous indifference. Andrew Markus is the editor of journals on Aboriginal history, intercultural studies and labour history, and was a consultant to the Fitzgerald Committee on Australia's immigration policies. The author of "Blood from a Stone", he is currently Senior Lecturer in History at Monash University, Melbourne. This book is intended for general readers, and students and researchers in Australian and Aboriginal studies.

In 1928, after a white man was killed, a punitive party mounted a series of attacks on Aborigines northwest of Alice Springs. The party's leader admitted that 31 Aborigines were killed. One missionary in the area put the toll at 70; another at as many as 100. Since 1911, the administration of the Northern Territory had been the direct responsibility of the Commonwealth. In placing this event and others within the context of policies pursued by the national government, Governing Savages reveals how policies of brutality and calculated neglect bequeathed a bitter legacy to subsequent generations.

Most non-Indigenous Australians know of Charles Perkins. Many are familiar with a few other Aboriginal leaders. Yet few have heard of William Cooper, one of the most important Aboriginal leaders in Australia's history. "Thinking Black" tells the story of Cooper and the Australian Aborigines' League, and their campaign for Aboriginal people's rights. Through petitions to government, letters to other campaigners and organisations, and entreaties to friends and well-wishers, the book reveals their passionate struggle against dispossession and displacement, the denial of rights, and their fight to be citizens in their own country. Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus document the circumstances behind the most significant moments in Cooper's political career - his famous 1933 petition to King George V, his call for a 'Day of Mourning' in 1938, the walk-off from Cummeragunja in 1939 and his opposition to an Aboriginal regiment in 1939. It explores the principles Cooper drew on in his campaigning, not least his 'Letter from an Educated Black', surely one of the most intriguing political testaments by an Australian leader. "Thinking Black" sheds new light on the history of what it has meant to be Aboriginal in modern Australia. It reveals the rich and varied cultural traditions, both Aboriginal and British, religious and secular, that have informed Aboriginal people's battle for justice, and their vision of equality in Australia of two people: equal yet distinct.