One of Australia’s finest essayists, the first to cut through ‘the great Australian silence’ to convey the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture to settler Australians‘The most literate and persuasive of all contributions on Australia’s Indigenous people’ —Marcia LangtonW.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures he exposed a ‘cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’, regarding the fate of First Nations people, f...

Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner is perhaps most well known for coining the phrase the 'great Australian silence', addressing the culture of denial or 'conscious forgetting' regarding the history Australia since European arrival.This reprint of On Aboriginal Religion pays tribute to the ongoing relevance of Stanner?s work. His research into Aboriginal religion was first published as a series of articles in the journal Oceania between 1959 and 1963. In 1963 the articles were p...

The Souls of Black Folk is a classic work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology, and a cornerstone of African-American literary history.The book, published in 1903, contains several essays on race, some of which had been previously published in Atlantic Monthly magazine. Du Bois drew from his own experiences to develop this groundbreaking work on being African-American in American society. Outside of its notable place in African...

Frederick Douglass was born in slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey near Easton in Talbot County, Maryland. In 1838 he escaped from slavery and went to New York City, where he married Anna Murray, a free colored woman whom he had met in Baltimore. Soon thereafter he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In 1841 he addressed a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket and so greatly impressed the group that they immediately employed him as an agent. He w...

Frederick Douglass was born in 1817 and lived for ten years as a slave upon a Maryland plantation. Then he was bought by a Baltimore shipbuilder. He learned to read, and, being attracted by "The Lady of the Lake," when he escaped in 1838 and went disguised as a sailor to New Bedford, Mass., he adopted the name Douglas (spelling it with two s's, however). He lived for several years in New Bedford, being assisted by Garrison in his efforts for an education. In 1841, at an anti-slavery conven...

It is one of Australia's most iconic images. On 17 April 1993, the Indigenous AFL footballer Nicky Winmar stood up against racial abuse and made history. Facing the Collingwood crowd that had taunted him all day the St Kilda player pulled up his shirt, pointed to his chest and declared: 'I'm black and I'm proud to be black'.Published the next day, the photos of Winmar's gesture sparked an intense debate that forced the AFL, the fans and the nation to confront their prejudices head-...

This is not a book of documents, snippets or worthy speeches. Instead it presents the original essays and the moments of insight that told us what Australia is and could be.These are the essential statements – from historians, reporters, novelists, mavericks and visionaries – that take us from Federation to the present-day, and tell a story of national self-discovery.There is the Frenchman who saw that Australia was a 'workingman's paradise', and the histor...

The current Status criteria of theIndian Act contains descent-based rules akin to blood quantum that are particularly discriminatory against women and their descendants, which author Pamela Palmater argues will lead to the extinguishment of First Nations as legal and constitutional entities. Beginning with an historic overview of legislative enactments defining Indian status and their impact on First Nations, the author examines contemporary court rulings dealing with Indigenous identity, ...

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History represents a lifetime's original reflection by Australia's most innovative and penetrating historian. Included here are classic essays on the pioneer legend, Australian egalitarianism and colonial culture. There are celebrated critiques of The Tyranny of Distance, multiculturalism and nationalistic history, as well as a substantial essay on Aboriginal dispossession and the history wars.In Sense and Nonsense in Australia...

In this national bestseller Robert Manne attacks the right-wing campaign against the Bringing them home report that revealed how thousands of Aboriginal children had been taken from their parents.What was the role of Paddy McGuinness as editor of Quadrant? How reliable was the evidence that led newspaper columnists from Piers Akerman in the Sydney Daily Telegraph to Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne Herald Sun to deny the gravity of the injustice done?...

"We can no longer pretend we don't know about residential schools, murdered and missing Aboriginal women and 'Indian hospitals.' The only outstanding question is how we respond." —Tom Sandborn, Vancouver SunA shocking exposé of the dark history and legacy of segregated Indigenous health care in Canada.After the publication of his critically acclaimed 2011 book Drink the Bitter Root: A Writer’s Search for Justice and He...

In Quarterly Essay 64, Stan Grant takes a deep and passionate look at Indigenous futures, in particular the fraught question of remote communities.In a landmark essay, Stan Grant writes Indigenous people back into the economic and multicultural history of Australia. This is the fascinating story of how fringe dwellers fought not just to survive, but to prosper. Their legacy is the extraordinary flowering of Indigenous success - cultural, sporting, intellectual and social - that w...