The University of New South Wales Press, which later published the book in 2012, said it "profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between Indigenous Australians and European settlers.
"[1] Robert Manne described it as "an important landmark", while Professor Cassandra Pybus of the University of Sydney[2] wrote of the book that "no one could doubt the magnitude of Henry Reynolds' achievement in profoundly changing the way we understand our past".
Aboriginal people lived along the Sydney harbour foreshores[3] where they "fished and hunted the waters and hinterlands of the area, harvested good from the surrounding bush".
[3] After James Cook arrived in 1770, the Aboriginal peoples' ancient way of life came to an end, as his job was to voyage to the Southern Continent and take possession of it - whether it was inhabited or not.
[citation needed] Ben Kiernan, a director of the genocide studies program at Yale University, wrote that nineteenth-century Australia colonists mounted numerous disciplinary expeditions against the Aboriginal people in which they committed "hundreds of massacres".
Kiernan claimed that in central Queensland 40% of the Indigenous population were killed, and that the Aboriginal people "were hunted like wild beasts, having lives for years in a state of absolute terror of white predators".
[citation needed] The most notable theme of the book is the analysis of Aboriginal resistance to the British at the time of the European settlement in Australia, which makes up about a third of The Other Side of the Frontier.
[5] According to historian Lyndall Ryan, the book is structured around three main themes: "a strong internationalism drawn from the United Nations Charter on Human Rights; that the ghost of racism underlies modern Australia; and Indigenous issues and justice should be at the center of public debate".
[5] To document this, he draws upon archival information on the language developed by Indigenous people to address European settlers and their activities, highlighting the gradual transition from a use of Aboriginal words to newly invaded terms indicative of the fear and resistance.
[16] Scholar Gray, states that this sets the Other Side of the Frontier apart from most historical books concerned with European settlement, which are in majority written from a colonial point of view.
[8] This criticism is based mostly on different historical methodologies that are used to collect data supporting or disproving of the existence of the Australian frontier wars, mostly in regard to which sources are deemed reliable in their records of Indigenous people death toll.
Windschuttle notes that the original sources Reynolds has used (which he does not reveal), have admitted guessing the death toll of Indigenous people with no clear knowledge of the actual numbers.
[19] In addition, Windschuttle also argues that Reynolds exaggerates the death toll of Indigenous people in his book, in order to support his claims about European settlement in Australia.
Reynolds, as Windschuttle argues, achieves this by deliberately taking out of context historical sources, like British settlers' ones, to support his claims on Australian history.
With regard to Reynolds' methodology of recording Indigenous people's death toll during European settlement, Windschuttle notes:[19] The Other Side of the Frontier has also been criticised for the socio-political aftermath of the book.