A usual plaudit for a book is that a reader “couldn’t put it down”. But a plaudit for David Marr’s new book, Killing for Country, which documents his family’s history as professional killers of Aboriginal people in NSW and Queensland in the mid-1800s, is that it is one you have to keep putting down.

It’s not just the brutality of the large-scale killings Marr documents that requires regular pauses, but the voices of white people discussing it – either in the most cold-blooded pragmatic terms, or in terms of horror. The chilling fact is that, no matter what was actually known or protested about at the time, the killings didn’t stop.