Letters – May 2025

The Wakefield Companion

Dear Editor,

Bob Ellis’s disappointment with the new edition of TheWakefield Companion to South Australian History, reviewed by Frank Bongiorno (ABR, March 2025), is naturally disappointing to me as general editor. But in justice to the contributors, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, his claim that our work deals largely with ‘European items of interest and Eastern European [sic] artists’ is simply puzzling. This especially when the first eleven articles range from ‘Aboriginal −European Frontier Conflict’ through ‘Aboriginal Histories’ and ‘Aboriginal Land Rights’ (including a whole paragraph on native title) to ‘Aborigines Protection Board’.