Bridging historical scholarship and Aboriginal oral tradition, this innovative book tells the story of the Gugu Badhun people of the Valley of Lagoons in North Queensland. It provides new insights into Aboriginal–European interactions, and new understandings of how Aboriginal people sustained their identities and exercised agency.It lays bare violence and oppression, but also recognises the inter-racial cooperation and friendships which were equally part of Gugu Badhun experience. ...

"The Wrong of Slavery" is a work written by Robert Dale Owen based largely off of the work of the Freedmen's Inquiry Commission where he served. It traces the early beginnings of the slave trade from its English beginning to the United States Civil War. It puts a focus on the barbarism of the slave trade from capture and transportation to the arrival in the Americas, the extreme cruelties that took place in the West Indies and South America, facts about slavery in the United States, and th...

A bold and provocative book about Australia's national identity and a plea to keep Australia's famed open-mindedness, Cater tracks the seismic changes in Australian culture and outlook since Donald Horne published THE LUCKY COUNTRY in 1964. 'A great book.' Rupert MurdochA bold and provocative book about Australia's national identity and how it is threatened by the rise of a ruling class. Nick Cater, senior editor at the Australian, tracks the seismic changes in Australian culture an...

Former publisher of Griffith Review Professor Julianne Schultz challenges our notions of what it means to be Australian and asks timely and urgent questions about our national identity.'Disruptive, bold and brilliant, The Idea of Australia is a work of masterful synthesis, intimate reflection and stunning vision' CLARE WRIGHTWhat is the 'idea of Australia'? What defines the soul of our nation?Are we an egalitarian, generous, outwar...

A cultural history of Australia told through our fiction.Australia's novels lie at the heart of the country. Capturing everyday lives and exceptional dreams, they have held up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the good and the bad. In this companion book to the ABC TV series, Carl Reinecke looks at the history of Australian culture through the books we have read and the stories we have told.Touching on colonial invasion, the bush myth, world wars, mass mig...

Convincing Ground is a wide ranging, personal and powerful work which resonates with historical and contemporary Australian debates about identity, dispossession, memory and community. For Pascoe, the Australian character was not forged at Gallipoli, Eureka and the back of Bourke, but in the more satanic furnace of Murdering Flat, Convincing Ground and Werribee. He knows we can't reverse the past, but we can bring our soul in from the fog of delusion. He proposes a way forward, be...

A new paperback reprint of this best-selling and ground-breaking history. When first published in 1996 Making Peoples was hailed as redefining New Zealand history. It was undoubtedly the most important work of New Zealand history since Keith Sinclair's classic A History of New Zealand.Making Peoples covers the period from first settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. Part one covers Polynesian background, Maori settlement and pre-contact history. Part tw...

Contrary to what you may think, local Aboriginal people did not lose their culture and die out within decades of Governor Phillip's arrival in Sydney in 1788.Aboriginal people are prominent in accounts of early colonial Sydney, yet we seem to skip a century as they disappear from the historical record, re-emerging early in the twentieth century. What happened to Sydney's indigenous people between the devastating impact of white settlement and increased government intervention a cen...

'This profoundly moving story is beautifully told by Rintoul without sentimentality . . . [but] with sympathy, truthfulness and restraint. In Rintoul, Lowitja O'Donoghue has found the biographer she (and we) deserve.' - Robert Manne, Sydney Morning HeraldI am sometimes identified as one of the 'success stories' of the policies of removal of Aboriginal children. But for much of my childhood I was deeply unhappy. I feel I had been deprived of love and the ability to love...

A journey between two culturesAfter more than 200 years of co-existence under the umbrella of a unique treaty, you might think things would be better than ever. In this perceptive and piercing book, John Bluck argues that Pākehā and Māori worlds grow ever more separate: the Aotearoa of today is a landscape of two predominant cultures, overlaid with so many others, fractured and more likely to erupt than Ruapehu. But has it always been this way?Becoming ...

Powerful and provocative, this is a beautifully written and very personal search to understand the men who were the protectors of Aboriginal people in Australia's north - their moral ambiguities, their good intentions and the devastating consequences of their decisions.On 13 February 2008 Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson gave two very different apology speeches to the Stolen Generations. Rudd alluded to racism, eugenics and the immorality of past policies. Nelson spok...

How distinctive is South Australia after all? South Australia has often been represented as "different": free of convicts, more enlightened in its attitudes toward Aboriginal people, established on rational economic principles, and progressive in its social and political development. Some of this is true, some of it is not, but mostly the story is more complex. In this book, eminent historians explore these themes by examining some key "turning points" in South Australi...