Congratulations to Alison Holland for the publication of Breaking the Silence. Aboriginal Defenders and the Settler State, 1905-1939 (MUP, 2019). This book recovers the conflicted politics of Aboriginal affairs in the first decades of the twentieth century, showing that there was no ‘great Australian silence’ on this question in the first half of the twentieth century. While the history books may have been silent, the politics on the ground, in the press, the auditorium, parliament, university, church and mission were anything but.