LYNDALL RYAN: 1943 - 2024 Professor Lyndall Ryan was a leading Australian historian who showed that rather than being rare, massacres were a key tool of colonisation and far more extensive than previously realised. She died on April 30 at Lake Macquarie Private Hospital in Gateshead, NSW, aged 81. Lyndall Ryan with her map showing the location of indigenous massacres.
Her PhD thesis on Tasmanian Aboriginal history began to be published in article form in the early 1970s and pushed back on the myth of Tasmanian colonial history that Truganini was the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. This research ran in parallel with her involvement in second wave feminism. In this arena, Ryan was a founding member of the first Sydney Women’s Liberation Group in 1970 and a contributor to feminist publications.
During this period she also became involved in the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre, an initiative that led to a lifelong interest in women’s reproductive health. Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre by Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan. Ryan’s groundbreaking monograph, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981), based on her 1975 PhD thesis, changed the face of Australian history.
A classic, it was expanded into a second edition (1996) that incorporated new research. Subsequent scholarship and controversy shaped an epic new work, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 (2012), shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Award in 2013. As her long-term friend and historian Professor Ann Curthoys.
