Dr Lyndall Ryan (born 1943) has held positions in Australian Studies and Women’s Studies at Griffith University and Flibnders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle. Her PhD thesis at Macquaroeu Universiyt (1975) was entitled "Aborigines in Tasmania, 1800-1974 and their problems with the Europeans".Her book “The Aboriginal Tasmanians” (1981) presented a critical interpretation the early history of relations between Tasmanian Aborigines and white settlers and was attacked by revisionist historian Keith Windschuttle in the so-called “History Wars” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndall_Ryan ).
Dr Lyndall Ryan review of “Van Diemen’s Land” (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2008) by James Boyce (2008): “James Boyce first came to national attention in 2003. His extended chapter, ‘Fantasy Island’, in Robert Manne’s edited collection, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, mounted a sustained attack on Windschuttle’s scholarship to undermine his argument that the Tasmanian Aborigines were a dysfunctional people whose criminal behaviour led to their own demise. The chapter turned the tide against Windschuttle and was hailed by Inga Clendinnen as “the jewel of the collection … If the discipline in Tasmania can produce historians of this calibre, it is in the very best of hands”. James Boyce’s new book Van Diemen’s Land was conceived and written in the heat of the Aboriginal ‘history wars’ and contests the two ‘stains’ that have marked Tasmanian colonial history since 1856. The first is the ‘hated stain’ of convictism. After the colony’s change of name to Tasmania in 1856, its early history went underground, denying the positive experiences of the convicts who were the majority of the population and became the founding mothers and fathers of Victoria… The second is the ‘indelible stain’ of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Rather than considering their fate as accidental or inevitable, Boyce contends that their killing and removal constitute genocide… Boyce reaches the grim conclusion: “The black hole of Tasmanian history is not the violence between the white settlers and the Aborigines – a well-recorded and much discussed aspect of the British conquest – but the government sponsored ethnic clearances which followed it. Boyce is the first Tasmanian historian since Clive Turnbull in 1948 and Bronwyn Desailly in 1977 to argue that the dispossession and near extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines were neither accidental nor inevitable: this was genocide.”
Lyndall Ryan, “Forged by war”, review of “Van Diemen’s Land” (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2008) by James Boyce, Overland 191 (2008): http://web.overland.org.au/?page_id=314 .