Showing 1–12 of 41 results
-
On Red Earth Walking: The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, Western Australia 1946–1949
Artist/Author: Scrimgeour, Anne$42.00 Add to cartIn 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically-important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red Earth Walking is the first comprehensive account of this significant, unique, and understudied episode of Australian history. Using extensive and previously unsourced archival evidence, Anne Scrimgeour interrogates earlier historical accounts of the strike, delving beneath the strike’s mythology to uncover the rich complexity of its history. The use of Aboriginal oral history places Aboriginal actors at the centre of these events, foregrounding their agency and their experiences. Scrimgeour provides a lucid examination of the system of colonial control that existed in the Pilbara prior to the strike, and a fascinating and detailed account of how these mechanisms were gradually broken down by three years of striker activism. Amid Cold-war fears of communist subversion in the north, the prominence of communists among southern supporters and the involvement of a non-Aboriginal activist, Don McLeod, complicated settler responses to the strike. This history raises provocative ideas around racial tensions in a pastoral settler economy, and examines political concerns that influenced settler responses to the strike, to create a nuanced and engaging account of this pivotal event in Australian Indigenous and labour histories.
-
The Original Australians: The Story of the Aboriginal People (Revised Edition)
Artist/Author: Flood, Josephine$36.00 Add to cartThe Original Australians tells the story of Australian Aboriginal history and society from its distant beginnings to the present day. From the wisdom and paintings of the Dreamtime to the first contact between Europeans and Indigenous Australians, through to the Uluru Statement, it offers an insight into the life and experiences of the world’s oldest surviving culture. The resilience and adaptability of Aboriginal people over millennia is one of the great human stories of all time.
Josephine Flood answers the questions that Australians and visitors often ask about Aboriginal Australia: Where did the Aboriginal people come from and when? How did they survive in Australia’s harsh environment? What was the traditional role of indigenous women? What are land rights? How do Aboriginal people maintain their culture today? And many more.
This bestselling account has been updated and is fascinating reading for anyone who wants to discover Aboriginal Australia.
-
Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal Encounters in the Archipelago
Artist/Author: Shellam, Tiffany$30.00 Add to cartThis book explores the experiences of Indigenous Australians who participated in Australian exploration enterprises in the early nineteenth century. These Indigenous travellers, often referred to as ‘guide’s’, ‘native aides’, or ‘intermediaries’ have already been cast in a variety of ways by historians: earlier historiographies represented them as passive side-players in European heroic efforts of Discovery, while scholarship in the 1980s, led by Henry Reynolds, re-cast these individuals as ‘black pioneers’. Historians now acknowledge that Aborigines ‘provided information about the customs and languages of contiguous tribes, and acted as diplomats and couriers arranging in advance for the safe passage of European parties’.
More recently, Indigenous scholars Keith Vincent Smith and Lynnette Russell describe such Aboriginal travellers as being entrepreneurial ‘agents of their own destiny’.
While historiography has made up some ground in this area Aboriginal motivations in exploring parties, while difficult to discern, are often obscured or ignored under the title ‘guide’ or ‘intermediary’. Despite the different ways in which they have been cast, the mobility of these travellers, their motivations for travel and experience of it have not been thoroughly analysed.
Some recent studies have begun to open up this narrative, revealing instead the ways in which colonisation enabled and encouraged entrepreneurial mobility, bringing about ‘new patterns of mobility for colonised peoples’.
-
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Artist/Author: Yunkaporta, Tyson$34.00 Add to cartThis remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger’s cat.
Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?
Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things.
Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.
About the Author: Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.
-
Two-way Science: An Integrated Learning Program for Aboriginal Desert Schools
Artist/Author: Deslandes, Chris, Sally Deslandes, David Broun, Cameron Hugh, Fiona Walsh, Felicity Bradshaw, Joanna Griffith$50.00 Add to cartTwo-way Science: An Integrated Learning Program for Aboriginal Desert Schools supports remote Indigenous schools and communities to develop integrated learning programs connecting the cultural knowledge of the local community with Western science and the Australian curriculum. A Two-way Science approach promotes Indigenous leadership in education, and fosters partnerships between schools, communities, Indigenous ranger programs and scientists. This book contains curriculum-linked education activities for primary and middle school students, and background knowledge for teachers, based on the desert regions of Australia.
-
The Songlines
Artist/Author: Chatwin, Bruce$16.00 Add to cart‘Songlines’ or ‘Dreaming Tracks’ are what all Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, tracks connecting communities and following ancient boundaries. To Aboriginals, they are the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’; they are both intricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. Bruce Chatwin provides a fascinating background to indigenous Australian life.
Along these lines, Aboriginals passed the songs which revealed the creation of the land and the secrets of its past. In this magical account, Chatwin recalls his travels across the length and breadth of Australia seeking to find the truth about the songs and unravel the mysteries of their stories. Bruce Chatwin has been able to trace a great deal about an Aboriginal culture as complex as it is different from our own. The conflict between the two ways of life mirrors that within ‘civilised’ man himself. Disputes over the right to excavate land that is sacred to wandering tribes highlight the importance of myth and instinct in the human psyche.
-
Kimberley History: People, Exploration and Development
Artist/Author: Clement, Cathie, Jeffrey Gresham, Hamish McGlashan$59.00 Read moreThis book is a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Kimberley’s early history.
In March, 2010 the Society held a one day seminar at the University of Western Australia entitled “Kimberley History: People, Exploration and Development”. Keynote speakers included Dr Mark Bin Bakar who talked on the Kimberley History from an Aboriginal perspective and Professor Mike Morwood who spoke on the Kimberley History from an archaeological perspective. Following these talks there were a series of talks outlining the early exploration and development of the Kimberley. In May 2012 the Proceedings Volume from this seminar was published containing 15 papers by different authors.
-
Buckley’s Chance: The Incredible True Story of William Buckley and How He Conquered a New World
Artist/Author: Linnell, Gary$35.00 Add to cartHe fought Napoleon’s army and survived. He was sent to the gallows and escaped the noose. Now he is in chains and on his way to the other side of the world. What happens next will become one of the most remarkable survival stories in history. The 19th century has just begun. The world is at war. England, ruled by a mad king, is exiling thousands of criminals to an old land that has become its newest dumping ground.
One of those prisoners is William Buckley, barely 21, a former soldier sentenced to life for stealing two small pieces of cloth. He’s a giant for his times. But it’s not just his towering frame that sets him apart. It’s his desire for freedom that will make his story so unique – even in an era famous for outrageous acts of bravery and heroism.
On a moonlit night Buckley escapes and disappears into the Australian bush. Discovered and adopted by an aboriginal tribe who regard him as a ghost, he is initiated into their rich and complex culture. Given up for dead by his white captors, he will not be seen again for more than 30 years until he emerges one day…carrying a spear, dressed in animal skins and having forgotten the English language.
Buckley’s Chance is a profound journey into a turning point in history where cultures clash, bitter rivals go to war and the body count mounts. It’s also the story of a man who refuses to be held down. A man prepared to defy all odds and take a chance. Buckley’s chance!
-
The Little Red Yellow Black Book: An introduction to Indigenous Australia (Fourth edition)
Artist/Author: AIATSIS, with Bruce Pascoe$21.00 Add to cartOriginally published in 1994, The Little Red Yellow Black Book has established itself as the perfect starting point for those who want to learn about the rich cultures and histories of Australia’s First Peoples. Written from an Indigenous perspective, this highly illustrated and accessible introduction covers a range of topics from history, culture and the Arts, through to activism and reconciliation. In this fourth edition, readers will learn about some of the significant contributions that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have made, and continue to make, to the Australian nation. Common stereotypes will be challenged, and the many struggles and triumphs that we’ve experienced as we’ve navigated through our shared histories will be revealed. Readers will also learn about some of the key concepts that underpin Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander worldviews including concepts such as the Dreaming, the significance of Ancestral Heroes and Country.
The Little Red Yellow Black Book is for readers of all backgrounds and provides an opportunity to discover more about the diverse, dynamic and continuing cultures of Australia’s First Peoples.
-
Salt: Selected Stories and Essays
Artist/Author: Pascoe, Bruce$35.00 Add to cartA collection of stories and essays by the award-winning author of Dark Emu, showcasing his shimmering genius across a lifetime of work.
This volume of Bruce Pascoe’s best and most celebrated stories and essays, collected here for the first time, traverses his long career and explores his enduring fascination with Australia’s landscape, culture and history.
Featuring new fiction alongside Pascoe’s most revered and thought-provoking nonfiction – including from his modern classic Dark Emu – Salt distils the intellect, passion and virtuosity of his work. It’s time all Australians know the range and depth of this most marvellous of our writers.
About the Author: Bruce Pascoe is an award-winning writer and a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man. He is a board member of First Languages Australia and Professor of Indigenous Knowledge at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2018 he was named Dreamtime Person of the Year for his contribution to Indigenous culture.
-
Mallee Country: Land, People, History
Artist/Author: Broome, Richard, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor, Katie Holmes$40.00 Add to cartMallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity – as well as the vagaries of international markets – to become some of Australia’s most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure.
Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora, and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.
-
The Gulf Country: The Story of People and Place in Outback Queensland
Artist/Author: Martin, Richard J$31.00 Add to cartThe story of the resilient people who make their home in Australia’s far north, from the ‘wild time’ of the frontier days to the present.
With its great rivers, grassy plains and mangrove-fringed coastline, Queensland’s remote Gulf Country is rich and fertile land. It has long been home to Aboriginal people and, since the 1860s, also to Europeans and to settlers with Chinese, Japanese and Afghan ancestry.
Richard J. Martin tells the story of a century-and-a-half of exploration and colonisation, the growth of cattle and mining industries, and the impact of Christian missionaries and Indigenous activism, through to the present day. He acknowledges the brutal realities of violence and dispossession, as well as the challenges of life on the land in northern Australia.
Drawing on extensive interviews with people across the Gulf Country, this is a lively and colourful account of tight-knit communities, relationships across cultures and resilience in the face of adversity.
