A shocking new history? The question of historiography, invasion and genocide in Nick Brodie’s The Vandemonian War

Nick Brodie promises that “everyone” who reads The Vandemonian War “will be shocked” (2). It certainly filled me with surprise and intrigue from the moment I first picked it up. There was the subtitle: “The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion.” Secret? I wondered. But historians have retold the story of Tasmania’s colonial settlement since the mid nineteenth century! The blurb offered an explanation that left me no less enquiring: “Governments and others succeeded in burying the real story of the Vandemonian War for nearly two centuries. And historians failed to see through the myths and lies – until now.” All historians have failed? How? The preface left me asking more questions: the “truth” of the Vandemonian War – that it was an “orchestrated invasion” and a deliberate genocide – was “discovered” by Brodie reading the records created by the Tasmanian Colonial Secretary’s Office (CSO) in the 1820s and 1830s, only a “tiny fraction” of which have been examined, analysed, or cited by previous historians. An endnote attached to this statement lists those scholars; it is the only place they are named in the book (2, 384). How valid was this claim? The question sent me to my bookshelf. I began scanning the endnotes and bibliographies of books on the list, including those by the most respected scholars of Tasmanian settlement history: James Boyce, Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan. I found they all contained many references to the CSO volumes and detailed explorations of the ideas of invasion and genocide.