By Timothy Bottoms, August 2023
When I finished my M.A.(Qual) (“Djarrugan, the Last of the Nesting”) back in 1990 there was no Native Title (The Act was passed on Christmas Eve, 1996). When I finished my M.A.(Qual) its seemed that nobody in Cairns was interested in the tribes of the Cairns Rainforest Region. That is why I started Chapter One of my Cairns History with Gungganydji observing the arrival of Cook and then later with Cunningham on the P.P. King expedition. It gave a completely different approach as to how we look at our Australian History. Henry Reynolds had published The Other side of the Frontier in 1981, and his follow up books which tried to tell the Indigenous side of our history, and I felt I should write an integrated history which told both sides of the story. That is why I tried to tell what happened from both sides, which unfortunately casts the 19th Century colonists in a different light.
