His brother, Edward, worked hard to keep Flanagan's legacy alive. In 1888 to commemorate one hundred years of settlement, Edward published, Flanagan's essays (that had been published in "The Empire") on the Australian Aborigines, in a slim book called "The Aborigines of Australia." This book is remarkable for its sympathetic portrayal of Aborigines at a time when white Australians saw them simply as 'savages' who would die out. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes his chapter on the Myall Creek massacre as "a restrained exercise in the use of evidence to prove guilt".