As a student at school and university in mid-20th century Hobart, Henry Reynolds received a conventional education in Australian history.

Which is to say he learnt absolutely nothing about the violent dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders after European settlement in 1788 – events he has referred to unambiguously in his controversial writings as “frontier war”.

Reynolds – today a professorial fellow at the University of Tasmania after half a century spent probing the dark recesses of Australian colonial settlement and posing discomfiting questions about continental sovereignty – uses his own awakening to illustrate what he calls the “great absence” in modern Australia’s narrative.

“Of course, I learnt nothing at school at all about the whole situation of frontier conflict and warfare,” he says. “Generally speaking there was nothing in the curriculum that would have taught you this....