Showing 1–12 of 22 results
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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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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.
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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!
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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.
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Hunter Wine: A History
Artist/Author: McIntyre, Julie, John Germov$50.00 Add to cartTime is an essential element of each glass of wine that we drink. Within moments of it being poured from a bottle, or when a barrel is exposed to air, wine begins to change in subtle and irreversible ways. At the other end of the temporal scale, the bedrock of the vineyard landscapes that grow the grapes to make this wine were formed over millennia past. From the deep past to the current moment, this book shows how historical influences and technological processes have shaped Hunter wine from vine to glass.
The Hunter Valley is Australia’s oldest wine region, so its history and heritage are integral to understanding how Australian wine has evolved. Australian cultures of making, selling and drinking wine are more than echoes of British and European traditions and trends — they represent new practices and styles. Hunter wine is the result of horticultural, chemical, technological, social and economic experimentation by men and women who have migrated to the region since the 1820s. In turn, the Hunter landscape and people have been shaped by the presence of vineyards and wineries since early colonisation.
This book gives new expression to connected histories of nature and culture in the region by viewing them through the lens of wine history.
Shortlisted for 2019 NSW Premier’s History Award: NSW regional and community history prize
‘This beautifully evocative, richly detailed book sets a new benchmark for writing about wine history in Australia.’ — Max Allen, Wine Journalist and author of The History of Australian Wine
‘An important Australian wine book that uncovers new truths, challenges old myths and moves at a cracking pace with a delicious wine tale just right for the present.’ — Jeni Port, Wine Journalist at The Age and 2014 Wine Communicator of the Year
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A History of South Australia
Artist/Author: Sendziuk, Paul, Robert Foster$40.00 Add to cartA History of South Australia investigates South Australia’s history from before the arrival of the first European maritime explorers to the present day, and examines its distinctive origins as a ‘free’ settlement. In this compelling and nuanced history, Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster consider the imprint of people on the land – and vice versa – and offer fresh insights into relations between Indigenous people and the European colonisers. They chart South Australia’s economic, political and social development, including the advance and retreat of an interventionist government, the establishment of the state’s distinctive socio-political formations, and its relationship to the rest of Australia and the world. The first comprehensive, single-volume history of the state to be published in over fifty years, A History of South Australia is an essential and engaging contribution to our understanding of South Australia’s past.
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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.
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Flinders: The Man Who Mapped Australia
Artist/Author: Mundle, Rob$25.00 Add to cartThe fascinating story of the exceptional maritime explorer, Matthew Flinders – the man who put Australia on the map.
Shipwrecks, storms, death and danger – Matthew Flinders encountered it all on his courageous quest to circumnavigate and chart the treacherous Terra Australis coastline.
From the drama of epic voyages and devastating shipwrecks; his part in the naming of Australia; his cruel imprisonment by the French on Mauritius for six long and harrowing years; the heartbreaking separation from his beloved wife; and the comfort he got from his loyal cat, Trim; to his tragic death at just forty.
This is a gripping adventure biography that details the life of Flinders, a true hero whose name is forever woven into the fabric of Australian history.
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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.
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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.
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Australia’s Original Languages: An Introduction
Artist/Author: Dixon, R. M. W.$34.00 Add to cartAn introduction to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait languages that explains their distinctive features accessibly for readers who have no previous experience with learning another language, and shows how language reflects traditional culture.
‘A must read for all who would like to understand the languages and culture of Indigenous Australians.’ Dr Ernie Grant, Elder of the Jirrbal nation
When Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay, about 250 distinct languages were spoken across the continent. Yet Australian Indigenous languages actually share many common features.
Bob Dixon has been working with elders to research Australian languages for half a century, and he draws on this deep experience to outline the common features. He provides a straightforward introduction to the sounds, word building, and wide-ranging vocabulary of Indigenous languages, and highlights distinctive grammatical features. He explains how language is related to culture, including kinship relationships, gender systems, and naming conventions.
With examples from over 30 languages and anecdotes illustrating language use, and avoiding technical terms, Australia’s Original Languages is the indispensable starting point for anyone interested in learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait languages.
‘Written in an accessible, easy to read style, Professor Dixon’s new book is an informative and entertaining introduction to Australia’s “original” languages.’ Dr Joe Blythe, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University
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First Footprints: The Epic Story of the First Australians
Artist/Author: Cane, Scott$37.00 Add to cartFirst Footprints tells the extraordinary story of the Aboriginal people of Australia. How they made their way out of Africa 60,000 years ago, and how they survived across this vast continent, from the harsh deserts of the inland to the glaciers of southern Tasmania. With photos from the ABC TV series of the same name.
Some 60,000 years ago, a small group of people landed on Australia’s northern coast. They were the first oceanic mariners and this great southern land was their new home. Gigantic mammals roamed the plains and enormous crocodiles, giant snakes and goannas nestled in the estuaries and savannahs.First Footprints tells the epic story of Australia’s Aboriginal people. It is a story of ancient life on the driest continent on earth through the greatest environmental changes experienced in human history: ice ages, extreme drought and inundating seas. It is chronicled through astonishing archaeological discoveries, ancient oral histories and the largest and oldest art galleries on earth. Australia’s first inhabitants were the first people to believe in an afterlife, cremate their dead, engrave representations of the human face, and depict human sound and emotion. They created new technologies, designed ornamentation, engaged in trade, and crafted the earliest documents of war. Ultimately, they developed a sustainable society based on shared religious tradition and far-reaching social networks across the length and breadth of Australia.
