Cirrus@Austlit

'This book is a lyrical, meditative exploration of the making and re-making of Australian History. In particular, it ponders the place of Australian ‘History’ as a scientific, evidence-based discipline bound up with nationhood and national identity, themes felt perhaps strongly with self-conscious colonisation in 1788, the ‘progress’ of nineteenth-century frontiers, the cause of Federation, and of course throughout the long echoes of the History Wars since the early 2000s.' (Introduction)

'Shellam writes that Meeting the Waylo is a ‘little book’, yet its immersion in multiple strands of scholarship, its impressive archival research, and its clear methodology make it a compelling and significant one. This is slow, well-crafted history; slow in the sense that three historical episodes lie at the heart of this book, and slow in the sense that the research, relationships, and insights undergirding it have accrued over time. Yet in this lies its power and its significance for historians, archivists, and curators of cross-cultural, Australian and Indigenous worlds.' (Introduction)

'Sweet Country may be a film constructed with the conventions of a Western – the guns, horses, spirits, and vast frontier landscapes with law and justice as central themes – but it is also a film grounded in oral history and the written archive. This article considers Sweet Country as a historical account of colonialism, scripted, directed and produced by an Indigenous team. It explores how the frontier and race relations are constructed, and how history is merged with myth and narrative to create a potent period piece with the timelessness of an epic and the urgency of the present.' (Publication abstract)

The dissertation 'traced the development of the cross-cultural world of New South Wales to 1835 by exploring key cross-cultural actions, rituals and material exchanges'.

Source: Abstract.

At a sandstone outcrop in Arnhem Land known an Injalak Hill, a traditional owner points to an enormous rock face. Adorning it are earthy reds and yellows, along with startlingly white clay. Spread across two pages in glossy colour, this image is but one of many in this book that may remind its Italian readers (some who may be reading this volume in its Italian edition) of treasured frescoes much closer to home. But instead of the familiar characters from the Book of Genesis are countless figures side by side or overlain: fish, kangaroos and crocodiles, all outlined in striking clarity and infilled with intricate designs. On the next page, anthropologist-and-philosopher Tony Swain has stressed that in Australia’s north, art and cosmology are deeply aligned and sometimes the same; Dreamings collide with the land, and once one is accustomed to experiencing them, then the country is alive with signs of their presence .'  (Introduction)