In recent months, the ‘W’ word seems to have become increasingly prominent in this country’s public discourse. Concerned educators have used it in reaction to the news of a planned national curriculum review, the Prime Minister used it when explaining his reasons for restricting the flow of information about incoming asylum seekers, and journalists have even used it to describe the current government’s attitude to renewable energies. The word is, of course, war.

But there’s another context in which the word is being used. At the time of writing, Henry Reynolds’ Forgotten War, had just won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Nonfiction. The subject of Reynolds’ book, the frontier conflict that defined early contact between Indigenous Australians and white colonists, is one that our Meanjin Papers essayist, Paul Daley, has also tackled in the past. In the Guardian last year he wrote about the Australian War Memorial’s resistance to the idea that its mandate, which is to ‘remember, interpret and understand’ the Australian experience of war, can or should include recognition of frontier conflicts, conflicts that Reynolds’ book convincingly characterises as war.