It contemplates why these agreements were forged, how the Aboriginal people understood their terms, why government repudiated them, and how settlers claimed to be the rightful owners of the land.
Bain Attwood also reveals the ways in which the settler society has endeavoured to make good its act of possession—by repeatedly creating histories that have recalled or repressed the memory of Batman, the treaties, and the Aborigines' destruction and dispossession—and charts how Aboriginal people have unsettled this matter of history through their remembering.