Forgotten rebels: Black Australians who fought back

by David Lowe

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Various authors

Reviews

[Trey Bigone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forgotten Rebels : Black Australians Who Fought Back: Black Australians Who Fought Back, by David Lowe.

Introduction
Forgotten Rebels began by accident. If anyone had told me four years ago that I would soon be writing Australian history I probably would have laughed. Most of my professional work at that stage had been in the video industry; writing and producing community service advertisements for television, and working towards a career in the film business.
In 1990 I began researching various historical characters, particularly the bushranger Thunderbolt, with a view to writing biographical screenplays to supplement my fictional film
concepts. While I was doing this research I came across several stories of Aboriginal‘bushrangers’.
Early in 1992 I began researching these intriguing snippets at the National Library, in Canberra.Preliminary reading convinced me that many of the indigenous Australians who had been dismissed as minor criminals by white history could have been more accurately described as
resistance fighters.
Although I had read about the warrior Pemulwuy, of the Sydney Eora people, it seemed odd that I had never before heard of all the other men and women throughout Australia who had fought to retain their lands and cultures. The common idea of Aborigines passively allowing themselves to be ravaged by disease and then massacred seemed increasingly misleading.