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Deep Time Dreaming
People would have known about Australia before they saw it. Smoke billowing above the sea spoke of a land that lay beyond the horizon. A dense cloud of migrating birds may have pointed the way. But the first Australians were voyaging into the unknown. Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent. Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century,...
Blind to Misfortune
Bill Griffiths lost both hands and both eyes when he was a prisoner of the Japanese in Java in 1942. This book tells the story of how he overcame these two shattering handicaps, either one of which might have qualified him to spend the rest of his life quietly in a home for the disabled. But Bill had no intention of allowing himself to become an object of pity and it was not long after his return to civilian life that he began to make it clear that, even if he had no hands and no eyes, he still had his own two feet and he certainly intended to stand on them. Inevitably life has not been without its ups and downs, and he certainly Bill could not have got where he has without the care and devotion of Alice, his wife. Their story is one of remarkable courage, told with no trace of bitterness and with a generous helping of laughter. It is a measure of the man that Bill can end his story with the words, "I've been lucky"!
The China Breakthrough
In June 1971, Australian Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam left Sydney for a tour of Asia. At the time, the People's Republic of China was a forbidding unknown in Australia - the subject of heated debate, charged imagination, and Cold War paranoia. When Whitlam returned from his tour, the debate had irrevocably changed. On the 40th anniversary of Australia-China diplomatic relations, The China Breakthrough reflects on the political adventure story that propelled this relationship into existence. The book follows Gough Whitlam's daring visit to China in 1971 and explores the dramatic international events and acts of secret diplomacy that underlie this key episode of diplomatic history. The Chin...
The Vandemonian War
Britain formally colonised Van Diemen’s Land in the early years of the nineteenth century. Small convict stations grew into towns. Pastoralists moved in to the aboriginal hunting grounds. There was conflict, there was violence. But, governments and gentlemen succeeded in burying the real story of the Vandemonian War for nearly two centuries. The Vandemonian War had many sides and shades, but it was fundamentally a war between the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and those Tribespeople who lived in political and social contradiction to that colony. In The Vandemonian War acclaimed history author Nick Brodie now exposes the largely untold story of how the British truly occupi...
Truganini
The haunting story of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman. Winner of the National Biography Award 2021 Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Non-fiction 2021 'A compelling story, beautifully told' - JULIA BAIRD, author and broadcaster 'At last, a book to give Truganini the proper attention she deserves.' - GAYE SCULTHORPE, Curator of Oceania, The British Museum Cassandra Pybus's ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne. For nearly seven decades, ...
Grits
In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters from various parts of Britain find themselves washed up together in a small town on the west coast of Wales, fixed between mountains and sea. Here, they both explore and attempt to overcome those yearnings and addictions which have brought them to this place: promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, petty crime, the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life lacks at the arse-end of this momentous century. A novel about the dispossessed and disenfranchised, about people with no further to fall, Grits is also resolutely about the spirit of the individual, and each character's story is told in their own rich, powerful dialect. Through their voices, the novel charts this chapter in their lives, presenting, with humour and rage and a deep underlying sadness, a picture of the diversity and waste that is life in Britain today.A work of power, passion and enormous originality, Grits describes - in language both mythic and demotic - ways of living that appear squalid but which aspire to the spiritual. As a novel that speaks for an under-class and a sub-culture, it stands comparison with Cain's Book and Trainspotting.
The Australian Archaeologist's Book of Quotations
"I used to begin a course on Australian economic history in the accepted manner with the European explorations of the eighteenth century until one day the archaeologist, John Mulvaney, enquired what I said about the earlier 99 per cent of time embraced by the human history of Australia." -- Geoffrey Blainey, 1975 *** "The discoverers, explorers and colonists of the three million square miles which are Australia, were its Aborigines." -- John Mulvaney, 1969 *** "Perhaps we should call what the Aborigines did 'fire-stick farming'." -- Rhys Jones, 1969 *** Australian archaeology has been involved in a great enterprise over the last 60 years, uncovering the deep past of a desert continent and th...
Fatal Contact
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 of the continent well into the twentieth century. The consequences still echo today in Aboriginal health and life expectancy.Many historians have acknowledged that introduced diseases caused much sickness and mortality among the Aboriginal populations and were part of the huge population decline following colonisation. But few writers have elaborated further, and much of this history is still missing, even after more than 200 years. Our knowledge and understanding of the biological consequences surrounding the meeting and contact of these two cultures has not yet been fully investigated. What the investigation in Fatal Contact reveals is nothing short of the greatest human tragedy in the long history of Australia. This is a vitally important story that all Australians should read.
Into the Heart of the Fire
This book examines the experience of the British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and places them in a broad intellectual, political, social, and cultural framework.
Living with the Anthropocene
Australia — and the world — is changing. On the Great Barrier Reef corals bleach white, across the inland farmers struggle with declining rainfall, birds and insects disappear from our gardens and plastic waste chokes our shores. The 2019–20 summer saw bushfires ravage the country like never before and young and old alike are rightly anxious. Human activity is transforming the places we live in and love. In this extraordinarily powerful and moving book, some of Australia's best-known writers and thinkers — as well as ecologists, walkers, farmers, historians, ornithologists, artists and community activists — come together to reflect on what it is like to be alive during an ecologica...
