Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality

Australians know very little about how Indigenous Australians came to gain the civil rights that other Australians had long taken for granted. One of the key reasons for this is the entrenched belief that civil rights were handed to Indigenous people and not won by them.

In this book John Chesterman draws on government and other archival material from around the country to make a compelling case that Indigenous people, together with non-Indigenous supporters, did effectively agitate for…