Item category 1: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection

In the creation of any new society, there are winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew from a colonial outpost to an affluent society. Richard Broome tells the history of Australia from the standpoint of the original Australians: those who lost most in the early colonial struggle f...

Since publishing his memoir Talking to My Country in early 2016, Stan Grant has been crossing the country, talking to huge crowds everywhere about how racism is at the heart of our history and the Australian dream. But Stan knows this is not where the story ends. In this long-awaited follow up, S...

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 exp...

Breaking the Silence recovers the conflicted politics of Aboriginal affairs in the first decades of the twentieth century. From 1905, when the report of the controversial Roth Royal Commission in Western Australia was made known to the public, to the eve of World War II, the condition, status and...

In far too many instances, interaction with governments has only made Indigenous lives worse. Despite this, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders and commentators still believe that working with the state is the only viable option. The result is constant churn and reinvention in Indigenous a...

This is a book for all Australians. Since the Uluru Statement from the Heart was formed in 2017, Thomas Mayor has travelled around the country to promote its vision of a better future for Indigenous Australians. He's visited communities big and small, often with the Uluru Statement canvas rolled ...

It's been almost fifty years since a teenage David Gulpilil illuminated screens worldwide with his breakout role in Walkabout. It was one of the first times we'd seen an Aboriginal person cast in a significant role and only four years after Holt's referendum to alter the constitution and give Ind...

Indigenous Australians are among the most incarcerated people on Earth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up 2% of all Australians, yet constitute more than a quarter of the nation's prison population. Over-representation in the criminal justice system by Indigenous men, women and young...

Stolen from his mother and placed into institutional care when he was only a few months old, Uncle Jack was raised under the government's White Australia Policy. The loneliness and isolation he experienced during those years had a devastating impact on him that endured long after he reconnected w...

Written in Pitjantjatjara and English, this book showcases the enduring legacy of senior Mimili Maku artist Mumu Mike Williams' extraordinary life and art.

Douglas was born to Indigenous parents and, as an infant, was the sole survivor of a cruel massacre in northern Queensland. As an adult, he was a charismatic speaker on Aboriginal rights, but spoke with a distinct Scottish burr. Why was this so? He was rescued by a kindly Scottish immigrant and b...

The Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia is a unique tool for exploring and understanding the lives and cultures of Australia's First Peoples. An atlas can represent - in graphic form - a pattern of human activities in space and time. This second edition of the award-winning Macquarie Atlas of...

This book explores the experiences of Indigenous Australians who participated in Australian exploration enterprises in the early nineteenth century. These Indigenous travellers, often referred to as 'guides', 'native aides', or 'intermediaries', have already been cast in a variety of ways by hist...

Written in Kriol and English, this is the story of Moli, a little pig who was lost in the bush. She is rescued by a young boy and taken home to his community, where she finds a happy home. Happy, that is, apart from the local dogs that keep chasing and frightening her. But even the dogs can't spo...

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, thousands of men from across the nation flocked to recruiting centres to sign up to serve in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). This figure includes approximately 1,200 Aboriginal people. The lives of these men as civilians were often fraught with difficul...

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, thousands of men from across the nation flocked to recruiting centres to sign up to serve in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). This figure includes approximately 1,200 Aboriginal people. The lives of these men as civilians were often fraught with difficul...

Before the colonisation of Australia, Aboriginal Australians lived on a wonderful larder of fresh fruit, vegetables and lean meat, in a land largely free from disease, with more exercise, less stress and supportive communities. Today, in Aboriginal communities all over Australia, there are higher...

This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger's cat. Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this...

"We want you to come with us on our journey, our journey of songspirals. Songspirals are the essence of people in this land, the essence of every clan. We belong to the land and it belongs to us. We sing to the land, sing about the land. We are that land. It sings to us." Aboriginal Australians a...

After undergoing heart surgery in 2012 and facing his own mortality, Warren Mundine didn't feel he had time to pussyfoot around anymore. He realised he mightn't get another chance to say what he thought. By that time in his life he had already delivered dozens of speeches and written numerous new...

It has been over twenty years since the release of the landmark Bringing them home report and more than a decade since the national apology was delivered by then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to Stolen Generations survivors -- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who have suffered as the...

What do you do when the institutions that were meant to protect you instead denied you your childhood? This is the true story of Bruce Trevorrow, whose pursuit of justice sparked a thirteen-year legal battle that would make Australian history. On Christmas Day 1957, Joe Trevorrow walked through t...

'That's the way it is with us mob. We were brought up to talk kind of sideways. That's the respectful, true Aboriginal way.' Reg Dodd grew up at Finniss Springs, on striking desert country bordering South Australia's Lake Eyre. For the Arabunna and for many other Aboriginal people, Finniss Spring...

A powerful memoir of a true Australian legend: stolen child, musical and lyrical genius, and leader. No one has lived as many lives as Archie Roach - stolen child, seeker, teenage alcoholic, lover, father, musical and lyrical genius, and leader but it took him almost a lifetime to find out who he...

That Was My Home explores the hidden histories of the Noongar camps around Fremantle, Swanbourne and Shenton Park in the suburbs of Perth along the Swan River. The focus is the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, a time when many Noongar people lived with their families in camps. The voices of Noongar people...

Ngarta and Jukuna lived in the Great Sandy Desert. They traversed country according to the seasons, just as the Walmajarri people had done for thousands of years. But it was a time of change. Desert people who had lived with little knowledge of European settlement were now moving onto cattle stat...

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...