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Most Australian history books look north from the southeast of the continent and most have hundreds of predecessors. Refreshingly, Regina Ganter's book looks south from a broad sweep across the north of the continent and has few forerunners. It is a lavishly produced two-column landscape-style book that was short-listed for the 2006 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. Based on more than one hundred interviews with indigenous Australians and those of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Malay and Afghan descent, and solid archival research, Mixed Relations will do much to overturn the dominant paradigm of colonisation that views events from 1788 and related only to European colonisation.

The book has quite clear predecessors, particular Ganter's own work Pearl-Shellers of Torres Strait (1994) which gave her an initial interest in the north and multi-ethnic communities. Other forerunners are the C. Campbell Macknight's A Voyage to Marege (1976) and The Farthest Coast (1969) which introduced Australian historians to the influence of annual visits from trepangers from Macassar in Sulawesi over several hundred years, halted by Australian government decree early in the twentieth century. There is also the work of anthropologists that explored the inter-relations of these Asian visitors with the northern Aboriginal community and books on the short-lived settlements at Melville Island, Raffles Bay and Port Essington (1824-1849) which are permeated with Asian contact. Some of the etchings from the times show the Macassan trepang camps, and one oft reproduced image is of Ponassoo, a Macassan captain who met Mathew Flinders in 1803 when he was exploring in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Other ancestors are the 1981 Aboriginal-Asian issue of Aboriginal History, and of course the various histories of the Northern Territory where Chinese dominated the settler population from the 1880s until the early decades of the twentieth century, and G.C. Bolton's A Thousand Miles Away (1963), a history of North Queensland. While Ganter's book was being researched and written, Henry Reynolds wrote North of Capricorn (2003), covering much the same area with a similar emphasis. The clues have been around for a long time, but this is the first extensive examination of the very mixed citizenship in northern Australia and inextricable links with indigenous Australians.

Ganter's book is divided into eight chapters: the Sulawesi connections, the interrelationship between northern Aborigines and Indonesians, pearling in the north of Western Australia, government "protection" of Aborigines from Asians, Asians in Darwin, a survey of the entire the polyethnic north and its decline, and the mixed history that remains today. All are interspersed with discrete interview sections with other interviews woven in throughout. My only regrets are that Pacific Islander immigrants, who also spread throughout the north from the Gulf of Carpentaria, through Torres Strait and down into Queensland, and who also inter-married with Aborigines and Asians, are left out, as are the Javanese at Mackay, the oldest continuous Muslim community in Australia.

Ganter's book is a benchmark study, both in its complex technique and in bringing together previous scattered work, plus its unique oral testimony, painstakingly gathered over many years. Australia should never again be viewed only from the south and along with Reynold's North of Capricorn, Ganter's book may just manage to turn back the historical tide.

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