Item category 1: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection

The Australian story began long before the arrival of the First Fleet. We Australians all know this. We have always known this. Australia finds itself standing on the edge of a 60,000-year-old precipice. The Uluru Statement From The Heart respectfully asks for First Nations people to finally be g...

Writer Ellen van Neerven plays football from a young age, learning early on that sport can be a painful and exclusive world. The more she plays, the more she realises about sport's troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality - and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereig...

This is a raw, gritty, inspiring, eye-opening true story of one woman's life that represents the lives of so many other Aboriginal women like her. Life is tough for the Connell family, growing up in a small town where racist attitudes, discrimination and violence against Aboriginal people are ...

This book features the lyrics of the songs of Archie Roach and his life partner and musical collaborator, Ruby Hunter, curated by Archie's manager and friend, Jill Shelton. It includes stories, photographs and tributes. Archie's songs stand as anthems for the experience of dispossession.

A vibrant, breathtaking documentation of one of the most distinctive art movements in Australia and the political drive that underpins it al The Spinifex people have been living on their ancestral homelands in the Great Victoria Desert, Western Australia, Tjuntjuntjara since time immemorial. This...

The 12 short life stories in Telling are grounded in First Nations storytelling traditions and reveal the diverse and complex nature of the experience of living in the wake of colonialisation. Telling fits with this year's NAIDOC theme, For Our Elders. It also speaks to the contemporary political...

The Welcome to Country Handbook by Professor Marcia Langton is your accessible introduction to First Nations Peoples, histories and cultures. Drawn from the book Welcome to Country, this guide is essential reading for every Australian, and an excellent resource for cultural awareness training in ...

The true story of the first Aboriginal filmmaker William "Bill" Onus, a truly heroic cultural and political figure who revived his people's culture in the 1940s and ignited a civil rights movement that would, against enormous odds, change the course of history. Told by his grandson Tiriki through...

Former National Rugby League (NRL) star Dean Widders is a man on a mission. After fellow Indigenous players Preston Campbell, Timana Tahu and George Rose devised their own pre-game performance to match the haka of their Maori counterparts, Widders began a journey to bring this dance and First Nat...

What do you need to know to prosper for 65,000 years or more? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. Many First Peoples regard the land as a reflection of the sky and the sky a reflection of the land. Sophisticated ast...

It doesn't get any better than this. Ash Barty, the greatest Australian tennis player of the modern era, rewrote history by winning the 2022 Australian Open and becoming the first Australian woman to do so since 1978. The Barty Party has moved at an incredible speed since she first broke through ...

"Forty-four attempts have been made to change the Australian Constitution since Federation in 1901 but only eight of those attempts have been successful. In 2022, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese decided to launch another attempt at constitutional amendment. His intention: to hold a referendum pro...

Balharda the bobtail felt pretty in her necklace of wildflowers. But the Bidi-bidi butterflies laughed and said she was ugly. Who will be bobtail's friend? In this Aboriginal Dreaming story, follow Balharda downriver from the desert to the sea and learn how words can hurt or heal, and how making ...

Finding the Heart of the Nation 2nd edition focuses on the stories of First Nations People, including some new voices, looking at the truth of our past and present, and hopes for a better future. Importantly, he shares with you - the Australian public - how we all have the power to make change. T...

We know more about pine nuts than bunya nuts, kale than warrigal greens, but there's an edible pantry of unique flavours that First Nations people have been making the most of long before anyone came up with the word 'foodie'. Welcome to a food-lover's guidebook to the First Foods of this contine...

Spoken through Rhys Paddick and Emma Gibbens, From Country with Love walks readers into a world where connection flourishes. The book explores our connection to Country (land, nature, mother earth) and to each other. While the concepts are simple on first reading, their depth is demonstrated afte...

Maku loves watching movies. It's his favourite thing to do. He especially loves movies with superheroes. Maku's second favourite thing to do is go bush with his nan and pop. They show him the Emu in the sky and tell him about the Rainbow Serpent.

Seven Indigenous students leave their communities to spend a year at one of the oldest and most elite boarding schools in the country, Geelong Grammar School. Every year, around 3000 Indigenous students receive scholarships to attend some of Australia's most prestigious boarding schools. It is an...

Plants are the foundation of life on Earth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have always known this to be true. For millennia, reciprocal relationships with plants have provided both sustenance to Indigenous communities and many of the materials needed to produce a complex array of t...

In 'Remote as Ever', David Scrimgeour tells the story of his working life as a doctor in isolated communities in Australia's Western Desert in the late 1970s. Being involved in the Homelands movement and the Aboriginal community-controlled health campaign gave him significant insight into the str...

Leader of the Oyster Bay nation of south-east Tasmania in the 1820s and '30s, Tongerlongeter and his allies prosecuted the most effective frontier resistance ever mounted on Australian soil, inflicting some 354 chiefly civilian casualties. His campaign inspired terror throughout the colony, forci...

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...