Dr Robyn Smith, the author, is a lecturer in colonial history at Charles Darwin University and a conjoint lecturer at the University of Newcastle. The book is a forensic account of violent frontier expansion across Australia’s north with particular emphasis on the Northern Territory. Robyn reveals not only the perpetrators of massacres but their benefactors and enablers. She demonstrates how colonialism was subtly perpetuated by the conferral of high civic honour on many of the actors, noting that these are embedded as place names across the landscape.