Item category 1: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection

Douglas Lockwood began writing books based on his own knowledge and experiences with the Aborigines of northern and central Australia in the late 1950s. Included in this book are stories of Aboriginal people &and culture, including Albert Namatjira. Some of the tribes represented include: Aranda,...

On the bank of a great river, six Indigenous women gather: a community leader, a city girl, a niece with a bucketload of issues, a woman from a mission town, a park ranger, and the curator of a museum's Indigenous unit. These women are connected by kinship, but their worlds are far apart, separat...

From a falling star to a lonely whale, an entertaining lizard to an enterprising penguin, these Indigenous stories are full of wonder, adventure and enduring friendships. Told in the style of traditional teaching stories, these animal tales take young readers on adventures of self-discovery and f...

Bruce Pascoe has collected a swathe of literary awards for Dark Emu and now he has brought together the research and compelling first person accounts in a book for younger readers. Using the accounts of early European explorers, colonists and farmers, Bruce Pascoe compellingly argues for a recons...

Albert 'Pompey' Austin (Poorne Yarriworri) was a man between two worlds in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was one of the most important multi-sports Indigenous person of that era. In his brief life he was not just a footballer, but also a cricketer, pedestrian (as athletes were cal...

Rediscover this much loved book featuring the cheeky antics of dogs in a remote outback community, and experience Kriol, a lively language from the north of Australia. Mandeitaim aibin wok la main anti kemp en yu sabi wanim aibin luk? So begins this Kriol edition of the cheeky book set in a remot...

This second edition of The Cherry Picker's Daughter is an exquisite portrait of growing up Aboriginal on the fringes of outback towns in NSW in the mid-twentieth century. Its an important book for school libraries and classrooms, with profound insights into the extraordinary strength, resilience ...

Butcher Joe Nangan was one of those charismatic people who exercised a most profound impact on all who met him. Having spent his life acquiring the ritual knowledge and lore, not only of his own Nyikina and Walmajarri forbears but also that pertaining to the lands of his neighbours, Nangan believ...

I travel Country, like my Old People done. I see the Country, like my Old People done I burn Country, like my Old People done. I sing Country, like my Old People done - Jacob Morris, Ban Maganindadjyang (My Old People Done) Guwayu, For All Times is a collection of First Nations poems commissi...

"Between 2012 and 2019 Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis, Inge Kral and Jennifer Green worked together to make an enduring record of endangered verbal arts in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands communities of Western Australia. They filmed traditional Ngaanyatjarra tjinytjatjunku or mirlpa (telling stories while dr...

Loving Country is a powerful and essential guidebook that offers a new way to travel and discover Australia through an Indigenous narrative. In this beautifully designed and photographed edition, co-authors Bruce Pascoe and Vicky Shukuroglou show travellers how to see the country as herself, to k...

In this beautifully crafted, evocative and poignant anthology of prose and fiction, a diverse group of young black writers are encouraged to find strength in their voices and what is important to them. maar bidi is a journey into what it is to be young, a person of colour and a minority in diverg...

Mavis Ngallametta (Kugu-Uwanh people, Putch clan, 1944-2019), one of Queensland's most esteemed artists, was a senior Cape York artist who was born 'out bush' near Aurukun in 1944. Her traditional country is around Kendall River, south of Aurukun. Mrs Ngallametta's career was very short, but high...

In New South Wales alone, more than a thousand Aboriginal men and a smaller number of women toiled for authorities across the state after 1862. This book tells the often unlikely stories of trackers including Billy Bogan, Jimmy Governor, Tommy Gordon, Frank Williams and Alec Riley.

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, ...

Our people had thrived here on the so-called New England Tableland since the first sunrise. But in the 1830s, squatters began invading the region with their plagues of livestock. Colonization plunged Aboriginal society into utter chaos, driving us off our lands and decimating the traditional way ...

The haunting story of the extraordinary Aboriginal woman behind the myth of 'the last Tasmanian Aborigine'. The name of Truganini is vaguely familiar to most Australians as 'the last of her race'. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy: the extinction of the original people...

A ground-breaking work - and a call to arms - that exposes the ongoing colonial violence experienced by First Nations people. In this collection of deeply insightful and powerful essays, Chelsea Watego examines the ongoing and daily racism faced by First Nations peoples in so-called Australia. Ra...

Violent conflict on the Australian frontier started soon after the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. This continued right up to the early 1900s with the last massacre of first Australians being recorded in 1928. In this short and succinct account Marji Hill tells the stories of five Aboriginal ...

In 1957, Ella Simon of Purfleet mission near Taree, New South Wales, applied for and was granted a certificate of exemption. Exemption gave her legal freedoms denied to other Indigenous Australians at that time: she could travel freely, open a bank account, and live and work where she wanted. In ...

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 ...

Mary McCarthy is a storyteller, artist, teacher, healer, creative and intuitive who gently plaits her accounts in this exquisite memoir of living and working in remote Arnhem Land. From a young girl, Mary has had a deep connection to the land and to our First Nations peoples. Her understanding an...

From a victim of the 'stolen generations' comes a remarkable memoir of abuse, survival and ultimately hope. Born in country NSW in the 1940s, baby Dianne is immediately taken from her Aboriginal mother. Raised in the era of the White Australia policy, Dianne grows up believing her adoptive Irish ...

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 an...

"We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future." On 26 May 2017, after a historic process of consultation, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was read out. This clear and urgent call for ref...

An authoritative study of pre-colonial Australia that dismantles and reframes popular narratives of First Nations land management and food production. Australians' understanding of Aboriginal society prior to the British invasion from 1788 has been transformed since the publication of Bruce Pasco...

Fatal Contact explores the devastating infectious diseases introduced into the Indigenous populations of Australia after the arrival of the British colonists in 1788. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and sexually transmitted diseases swept through the Indigenous populations...

Discover the rich cultural heritage of Australia's first people then and now in one of the world's first centres of civilisation. Learn about the vast, sweeping epic story of Australia's first people dating from 65,000 years ago to the present day.

Poor old Grandfather Emu can hardly walk or see. Of all the bush animals, who will lead old Weij to the creek for food and water? And learn how Mother Yonga Kangaroo got her pouch, and the importance of taking the time to help.

In mid-1824, the Bathurst district was under siege. Local Wiradjuri people had broken off contact with the English and vowed to kill all white men. Warriors raided outstations, killing people and stock with impunity while large warbands threatened stock-workers. Wealthy Sydney-based landholders c...