Reviews of Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in love with your country

Paul Burns, Reviews in Australian Studies, Vol. 2, No. 7, 2007
This beautifully written book, with its fierce determination to recognise and right the wrongs of history, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where Aboriginal people are coming from. Some passages may unduly perturb university-trained historians like myself, or mightily disturb the general reader. That is partly the author’s intention. But it is sometimes a good thing to have one’s ideas so shaken up that one is forced to rethink them.

Sydney Morning Herald, 17 July 2007
Pascoe insists it is not another black armband version of Australian history. It is simply an attempt "to fall in love with your country" by looking with hardedged honesty, at the way the Aboriginal people (specifically the Kulin clans around Port Phillip and western Port) were treated by early settlers and then using that as a stepping stone to abroader understanding of what it actually means to be an Australian.

Barry Dickins, Overland 189, Summer 2007
It gives its reader the rare chance to understand hundreds of years of harm and a million longings...Here the sense of place is real and convincing as well as refreshingly penned. It feels that the creator of this healing work of gorgeous words in several languages no longer languishes between Heaven and Hell, but as a Wathaurong man is the first poet of his people.

Daan Spijer, Thinking Allowed, 16 November 2009
History depends on who writes it and the writing of it creates that history. On that basis, much of the history of this country is still missing.  Bruce Pascoe has gone some way to correcting this...This book should be compulsory reading for all teachers and should be on the syllabus of all schools.