This is the story of how Indigenous knowledge shaped the Australian continent. Based on the stunning SBS and Channel 10 TV series, The First Inventors takes readers on a journey through 65,000 years of innovation, diplomacy and design. It challenges everything you thought you knew about the deep history of Australia.This is what a history of Australia looks like when it has Indigenous perspectives at its heart.For over 65,000 years, people have made ...

With a historian's inquiring mind, Billy Griffiths excavates two absorbing twentieth century histories: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity and the uncovering of traces of ancient Australia by pioneering archeologists.Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. In this original, important book, Griffiths investigates a twin revolution- the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the simultaneous uncovering ...

This is the story of how Indigenous knowledge shaped the Australian continent. Based on the stunning SBS and Channel 10 TV series, The First Inventors takes readers on a journey through 65,000 years of innovation, diplomacy and design. It challenges everything you thought you knew about the deep history of Australia.This is what a history of Australia looks like when it has Indigenous perspectives at its heart.For over 65,000 years, people have mad...

The acclaimed history of colonial Tasmania'A brilliant book and a must-read for anyone interested in how land shapes people' —Tim FlanneryAlmost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life.In this multi-award-winning history of colonial Tasmania, James Boyce shows how the newcomers were changed by the natural world they encount...

Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people. Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scient...

The Award-Winning History of Colonial Melbourne'James Boyce tells the true history of this country with rare clarity and an eye for the essential that never fails.' —David MarrWith the founding of Melbourne in 1835, a flood of settlers began spreading out across the Australian continent. In three years more land – and more people – was conquered than in the preceding fifty.In 1835 James Boyce brings this pivotal moment to life. He traces ...

Continuing the work of the award-winning Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta casts an Indigenous lens on contemporary society, using powerful Indigenous thinking to challenge us to face conflict and embrace conversation to find our way onto the right track.With Right Story, Wrong Story, Apalech Clan member Tyson Yunkaporta, from far north Queensland, tackles the divisions that prevent us from talking to one another. Drawing on deep Aboriginal knowledge, Y...

Let this series begin the discussion.' - Bruce Pascoe 'An act of intellectual reconciliation.' - Lynette Russell Songlines are an archive for powerful knowledges that ensured Australia's many Indigenous cultures flourished for over 60,000 years. Much more than a navigational path in the cartographic sense, these vast and robust stores of information are encoded through song, story, dance, art and ceremony, rather than simply recorded in writing. Weaving deeply personal storytelling with ex...

History has portrayed Australia’s First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteri...

What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. For millennia, Indigenous Australians harvested this continent in ways that can offer contemporary environmental and economic solutions. Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not sole...

Aboriginal design is of a distinctly cultural nature, based in the Dreaming and in ancient practices grounded in Country. It is visible in the aerodynamic boomerang, the ingenious design of fish traps and the precise layouts of community settlements that strengthen social cohesion. Alison Page and Paul Memmott show how these design principles of sophisticated function, sustainability and storytelling, refined over many millennia, are now being applied to contemporary practices. Design: Bui...

Stretching 1,400 miles along the Australian coast and visible from space, the Great Barrier Reef is home to three thousand individual reefs, more than nine hundred islands, and thousands of marine species, and has alternately been viewed as a deadly maze, an economic bounty, a scientific frontier, and a precarious World Heritage site. Now the historian and explorer Iain McCalman takes us on a new adventure into the reef to reveal how our shifting perceptions of the natural world have shape...