Showing 1–12 of 216 results
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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.
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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.
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The Mornington Peninsula to Wilsons Promontory: Including The Bass Coast, French Island & Phillip Island
Artist/Author: Freeman, Kornelia, Ulo Pukk$40.00 Add to cartThe Mornington Peninsula, Bass Coast and Wilsons Promontory, with picturesque beaches and a myriad of attractions, continues to attract crowds of daytrippers and holiday-makers. The Mornington Peninsula’s pristine sandy beaches and magnificent coastal views, spectacular golf courses, foreshore camping, surfing, sailing and some of the best art galleries, restaurants and wineries in Victoria, leave visitors with cherished and unforgettable memories.
The world-renowned Penguin Parade at Phillip Island, the intriguing rock formations at Cape Liptrap, strawberry and cherry farms, hedge mazes, hot springs, seal and dolphin tours, and historic homesteads, all are waiting to be discovered!
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Kinglake-350
Artist/Author: Hyland, Adrian$25.00 Add to cartKinglake-350 is a masterpiece of writing about family, community, country life and what happens when a day of ultimate terror arrives.
Adrian Hyland takes a dramatic and compelling sequence of events on that day and weaves them into a picture of universal significance and deep fascination.
On 7 February 2009 Roger Wood was the police officer in charge of Kinglake, at the epicentre of the worst bushfire disaster in Australia’s history, Black Saturday. As the firestorm engulfed the community, he risked his life, again and again, to try and save people.With the fire raging all around, he phoned home to warn his wife what was coming. She screamed that the fire had already hit their property. Then the line went dead.
Black Saturday was a many-headed monster in whose wake stories of grief, heroism and desolation erupted all over the state of Victoria. This is a book about the monster—and the heroism of those who confronted it.
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Black Saturday: Not the End of the Story
Artist/Author: Fraser, Peg$32.00 Add to cartThe Victorian bushfires of February 2009 captured the attention of all Australians and made headlines around the world. One hundred and seventy-three people lost their lives, the greatest number from any bushfire event in this nation’s history.
In the wake of this tragedy much media and public commentary emphasised recovery, resilience, community, self-sufficiency and renewed determination. Peg Fraser, working as a Museum Victoria curator with survivors in the small settlement of Strathewen, listened to these stories but also to other, more challenging narratives.
The memories and thoughts that Fraser heard, and gives voice to in this book, complicate much of what we thought we knew about the experience of catastrophic natural events. Although all members of the same community, Strathewen’s survivors lived through Black Saturday and its aftermath in ways that were often very different from each other.
Beginning each chapter with an object from the bushfires – among them a Trewhella jack, a burned mobile phone, a knitted chook and a brick chimney – Fraser explores and reveals how each person’s identity, including as a man or a woman with a particular social position in the town, impacted upon experiences and understandings of loss, survival and even the future.
This is historical truth of the most vital, affecting and powerful kind.
Shortlisted for the Victorian Community History Awards 2019
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Nikulinsky Naturally: An Artist’s Life
Artist/Author: Snell, Ted (Editor), Nikulinsky, Philippa (Artist)$43.00 Add to cartArtist Philippa Nikulinsky, AM, is a nationally and internationally recognised botanical illustrator. This book celebrates Philippa’s extraordinary career from the mid-1970s to today. Specialising in plants from harsh environments, especially the Great Sandy Desert, Philippa’s magnificent illustrations have been included in many books and magazines. Her career focuses on a lifetime fascination with the flora and fauna of the arid lands of Western Australia. For nearly 50 years she has travelled throughout the state to record, draw and paint its phenomenal natural history. She has shared her gift for watercolour painting through teaching, exhibitions, commissioned works and publications, most recently Cape Arid, (stock ID 13666) published in 2012.
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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’.
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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.
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A Water Story: Learning from the Past, Planning for the Future
Artist/Author: Beeson, Geoff$70.00 Add to cartFreshwater scarcity is a critical challenge, with social, economic, political and environmental consequences. Water crises in Australia have already led to severe restrictions being applied in cities, drought ravaging farmlands, and the near-terminal decline of some rivers and wetlands.
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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.
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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.
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Botany Bay and the First Fleet: The Real Story
Artist/Author: Frost, Alan$40.00 Add to cartNow in one definitive volume, Botany Bay and the First Fleet is a full, authentic account of the beginnings of modern Australia.
In 1787 a convoy of eleven ships, carrying about 1400 people, set out from England for Botany Bay, on the east coast of New South Wales. In deciding on Botany Bay, British authorities hoped not only to rid Britain of its excess criminals, but also to gain a key strategic outpost and take control of valuable natural resources.According to the conventional account, it was a shambolic affair: underprepared, poorly equipped and ill-disciplined. Here, Alan Frost debunks these myths, and shows that the voyage was in fact meticulously planned – reflecting its importance to Britain’s imperial and commercial ambitions. In his examination of the ships, passengers and preparation, Frost reveals the hopes and schemes of those who engineered the voyage, and the experiences of those who made it.
The culmination of thirty-five years’ study of previously neglected archives, Botany Bay and the First Fleet offers new and surprising insights into how Australia came to be.
