The story of the warrior Tongerlongerter, who cut off his own arm after it was injured in battle, is little known.
It happened on Australian soil about 1830 but few Australians have heard about it.
Tongerlongerter, a charismatic Tasmanian Aboriginal resistance fighter, led guerilla attacks in a violent struggle against European settlers.
But it was during a dawn raid by colonists that his arm was left shattered by musket fire.
What happened next is the stuff of legend for the island's Aborigines.
Tongerlongerter returned to camp, removed the arm with the help of his kinsfolk and then painfully cauterised the wound in fire.
The one-armed chief is considered one of the towering figures in the Tasmanian frontier conflict, which is known as the Black War.
"He was one of the most renowned and effective warriors against European encroachment," says Nicholas Clements, author of a book of the same title.
The war, considered by Clements to have taken place in Tasmania from 1824 to 1831, throws up its share of heroism and tragedy on both sides.
As well as Aboriginal warriors, there are stories of women holding off attacks on their homes with a single musket.
One, Judith Pearce, was speared five times and spent the rest of her life in an asylum.
Clements himself needed to come to terms with the involvement of an ancestor settler as he set about writing about the war's effect on real people.
The former metalworker and extreme sports enthusiast was forced into a career change when he injured his back while performing a cliff dive.
A reluctant university enrolment became a PhD in history, which in turn became The Black War.
The overarching cause of the war was invasion, Clements says, but a massive gender imbalance in the colony didn't help.
The spark was sexual violence against Aboriginal women, he argues.
"(The colonists are) out there under minimal supervision," he tells AAP.
"It doesn't take much of an imagination to predict what actually happened."
Tellingly, he says there are no records of sexual assault by Aborigines on white women.
Ambush was the tactic used by both sides, but the war observed a unique "solar rhythm".
Without exception, Aborigines attacked in daylight while colonists generally surrounded campfires before a dawn ambush.
Aborigines killed thousands of sheep and cows, but the fight wasn't over food - the meat was never eaten.
At the heart of the book is the conclusion that what took place was a genuine war.
Its major "battle", known as the "black line", Clements describes as the largest military offensive ever to take place on Australian soil, second only to the defence of Darwin during World War II.
It involved 10 per cent of the colony's population - 2200 men - and lasted nearly two months.
The war's outcome was the death of up to 1000 Aborigines - some in tribal conflicts exacerbated by the colony's growth - and 250 Europeans.
An Aboriginal population of up to 5000 at the time of European settlement had been reduced to little more than 200 traditional tribespeople.
That number was further reduced when they were exiled to Flinders Island in Bass Strait, before a myth of extinction was born with the death of tribal woman Truganini in 1876.
Clements' supervisor Professor Henry Reynolds says the book puts an end to the "history wars" he fought over Tasmania's past with conservative academic Keith Windschuttle.
Doubts over whether Tasmania's Aborigines were defending their land and the debate's most contentious issue, the number of casualties, are addressed, Reynolds says.
"(Windschuttle) says unless you've got clear documentation, you can't count them," Reynolds says.
"That's clearly impossible.
"Even now we convict people when the bodies haven't been found."
Windschuttle, whose 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History inflamed the "history wars", has already described the suggestion of 1000 deaths as a marketing tool.
He says Clements may have added 10 to 20 deaths to the 121 Aboriginal and 187 Europeans in 1803-31 that his research uncovered.
"But given the wild exaggeration that has characterised the work of the left-wing academic historians who have dominated this field since the 1960s, I would not believe anything he says until I have checked the original records for myself," Windschuttle says.
Clements is adamant his research is the most thorough yet undertaken on the conflict.
"It's possible during the whole conflict over the whole island there were 1000 deaths," he says.
"I think 600 in the eastern part of Tasmanian is a more grounded estimate.
"Even then I'm more than doubling what the recorded evidence tells us.
"But I don't just pull that number out of the sky."
Doubts of a different kind are coming from Tasmania's Aboriginal community, who Clements says he deliberately didn't consult to avoid distorting his conclusions.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre's Adam Thompson says consultation should have occurred.
"It's better if they talk to us first so we can ensure that they give us acknowledgment and talk about the Aboriginal community today so people reading these books can understand people have survived," he says.
The book doesn't place enough importance on the conflict's overall cause, Thompson says.
"It detracts from some of the overarching and fundamental elements of the war, such as the motivations of the colony and the right of the Aboriginal people to defend their land and their lifestyle against the foreign invader," he says.
Clements and Thompson, though, are at one in their belief the war's significance should be commemorated.
Thompson says Australia needs a national day to remember invasion and resistance.
"Something similar to Anzac Day, something with the same level of respect and perhaps even acknowledgement at the war memorial in Canberra for the Aboriginal resistance fighters that they were involved in a war," he says.
Clements says commemoration should be led by the Aboriginal community but Australia could take a leaf out of Germany's book.
"That doesn't mean a big campaign of guilt and shame," he says.
"I think it's just as important to empathise with the Europeans as to empathise with the Aborigines.
"If we all understood the history a bit better, it would help us to empathise with each other and to move forward."
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/23765130/tasmanian-book-re-sparks-history-wars/
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