From the 1970s until the 1990s—when what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’ came to a belated end, and the assimilation era gave way to self-determination under influential public servant ‘Nugget’ Coombs—the left’s support for Aboriginal causes appeared as natural as the right’s scepticism. But the election of the Howard government in 1996 coincided with generational change in Indigenous leadership, most significantly bringing Cape York’s Noel Pearson to the fore. Since then an intellectual shift has taken place, and the assumption that the left owns Indigenous policy in Australia has been challenged.

Damien Freeman and Shireen Morris’s collection, The Forgotten People: Liberal and Conservative Approaches to Recognising Indigenous Peoples, is a logical product of this shift. But its ambitions are greater than merely providing a catalogue of varying approaches to Indigenous issues. The editors hope to build intellectual and political support for their carefully negotiated model of Indigenous constitutional recognition. Though the book offers some useful insights, it also highlights a lack of will on the part of some conservatives to truly confront Australia’s past and present failings in Aboriginal affairs.