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Cover image courtesy of publisher.
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 A Handful of Sand : The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Fifty years ago, a group of striking Aboriginal stockmen in the remote Northern Territory of Australia heralded a revolution in the cattle industry and a massive shift in Aboriginal affairs. Now, after many years of research, A Handful of Sand tells the story behind the Gurindji people’s famous Wave Hill Walk-off in 1966 and questions the meanings commonly attributed to the return of their land by Gough Whitlam in 1975. Written with a sensitive, candid and perceptive hand, A Handful of Sand reveals the path Vincent Lingiari and other Gurindji elders took to achieve their land rights victory, and how their struggles in fact began, rather than ended, with Whitlam’s handback.'

'Not since Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians (1968) have the experiences of the Gurindji Walk-off leaders and their children been related with such insight and empathy. A Handful of Sand makes an essential contribution to understanding the complex nature of the challenges confronting both ‘white’ Australian policy makers and remote Aboriginal community leaders.' (Source: Publisher's website)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Clayton, Murrumbeena - Oakleigh - Springvale area, Melbourne South East, Melbourne, Victoria,: Monash University Publishing , 2016 .
      image of person or book cover 1700200147883586293.jpg
      Cover image courtesy of publisher.
      Extent: 400p.
      Description: 32 pages of illus
      Note/s:
      • Published August 2016
      ISBN: 9781925377163, 9781925377187 (eBook)

Works about this Work

Meat-Eaters Eve Vincent , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , June 2018;

'In 2015, Richie Benaud hosted an ‘Australia Day’ barbeque, a pantheon of colonial historical figures on his invite list. Benaud gathered the English navigator, Captain James Cook, who remapped and renamed the east coast of this continent in 1770, and Burke and Wills, whose agonising deaths at Coopers Creek in 1861 were possibly in part the result of them coming to rely on the seeds of an aquatic fern, nardoo (Marsilea drummondii), for nutrition.' (Introduction)

y separately published work icon [Review] A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Rolf Gerristen , 2017 21937563 2017 single work review
— Review of A Handful of Sand : The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Charlie Ward , 2016 single work non-fiction

'This book is an excellent and accessibly written local history of the 20 years following the celebrated 1960s Wave Hill Walk-off. Perhaps surfing – as much as creating – an attitudinal shift in the mainstream Australian community, the Gurindji Walk- off came to symbolise Aboriginal resistance to oppressions as well as persistence in the face of hostility from powerful establishment interests. Elements of the non- Aboriginal Australian community (some unions, some activists and eventually the Labor Party) accepted this Indigenous aspiration and allied with the Gurindji. A wave of support promised to realise the Gurindji’s dreams. Aspirational purity was then overgrown and stunted by some political hostility allied with much more bureaucratic incapacity and incoherence. Ward is a historian who was peripherally involved in the events he describes, although he is generally even-handed in his assessments. He introduces the usual characters of settlement politics, bickering activists, robber opportunists and passing bureaucrats that still interpose between the Aboriginal people of northern Australia and the state. After the post–walk off struggle, the Gurindji themselves started to divide, so that the dreams of the old heroes of the 1960s began to be less important as social change hit their community, as it did similar communities across remote Australia.'

y separately published work icon [Review] A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Rolf Gerristen , 2017 21937563 2017 single work review
— Review of A Handful of Sand : The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Charlie Ward , 2016 single work non-fiction

'This book is an excellent and accessibly written local history of the 20 years following the celebrated 1960s Wave Hill Walk-off. Perhaps surfing – as much as creating – an attitudinal shift in the mainstream Australian community, the Gurindji Walk- off came to symbolise Aboriginal resistance to oppressions as well as persistence in the face of hostility from powerful establishment interests. Elements of the non- Aboriginal Australian community (some unions, some activists and eventually the Labor Party) accepted this Indigenous aspiration and allied with the Gurindji. A wave of support promised to realise the Gurindji’s dreams. Aspirational purity was then overgrown and stunted by some political hostility allied with much more bureaucratic incapacity and incoherence. Ward is a historian who was peripherally involved in the events he describes, although he is generally even-handed in his assessments. He introduces the usual characters of settlement politics, bickering activists, robber opportunists and passing bureaucrats that still interpose between the Aboriginal people of northern Australia and the state. After the post–walk off struggle, the Gurindji themselves started to divide, so that the dreams of the old heroes of the 1960s began to be less important as social change hit their community, as it did similar communities across remote Australia.'

Yikarni. True Stories from Gurindji Country; A Handful of Sand. The Gurindji Struggle After the Walk-off Peter Read , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Northern Territory Historical Studies , no. 28 2017; (p. 92-96)

'These two excellent volumes fortuitously have appeared together, and can be read consecutively. Yikarni is a collection of historical narratives, mainly told in Gurindji, with an English translation on the opposite page. Charlie Ward, in A Handful of Sand, after a prolegomena that effectively takes up half the book, covers the declining fortunes of the Gurindji since Whitlam’s epic handful of sand.' (Introduction)

[Review Essay] A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-Off Mickey Dewar , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 48 no. 2 2017; (p. 296-297)

'Charlie Ward’s A Handful of Sand is an epic historical work, meticulously researched and beautifully written, with at its heart the events that shaped the lives of the Gurindji in the lead-up and aftermath of the historic walk-off. Ward takes us through the events in close detail that surround the iconic moment in 1975 when an Australian Prime Minister passed a ‘handful of sand’ to a Gurindji elder.'  (Introduction)

y separately published work icon [Review] A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Rolf Gerristen , 2017 21937563 2017 single work review
— Review of A Handful of Sand : The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Charlie Ward , 2016 single work non-fiction

'This book is an excellent and accessibly written local history of the 20 years following the celebrated 1960s Wave Hill Walk-off. Perhaps surfing – as much as creating – an attitudinal shift in the mainstream Australian community, the Gurindji Walk- off came to symbolise Aboriginal resistance to oppressions as well as persistence in the face of hostility from powerful establishment interests. Elements of the non- Aboriginal Australian community (some unions, some activists and eventually the Labor Party) accepted this Indigenous aspiration and allied with the Gurindji. A wave of support promised to realise the Gurindji’s dreams. Aspirational purity was then overgrown and stunted by some political hostility allied with much more bureaucratic incapacity and incoherence. Ward is a historian who was peripherally involved in the events he describes, although he is generally even-handed in his assessments. He introduces the usual characters of settlement politics, bickering activists, robber opportunists and passing bureaucrats that still interpose between the Aboriginal people of northern Australia and the state. After the post–walk off struggle, the Gurindji themselves started to divide, so that the dreams of the old heroes of the 1960s began to be less important as social change hit their community, as it did similar communities across remote Australia.'

A Handful of Sand by Charlie Ward Erich Mayer , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: ArtsHub , October 2016;

— Review of A Handful of Sand : The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Charlie Ward , 2016 single work non-fiction

'In August 1966, some 200 Gurindji people, led by Vincent Lingiari, walked off in protest.'

The Gurindji People's Epic Struggle Charlie Ward , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Land Rights News , October 2016; (p. 10-11)
'Fifty years after Vincent Lingiari led about 200 Aboriginal workers and their families off Wave Hill Station, a Darwin-based historian, Charlie Ward, has published a book, A Handful of Sand , which tells the story of the Gurindji people’s epic struggle to secure a new future, which laid the foundation for land rights in the Northern Territory.'
White Emissary from Canberra : A Celebration and Critique of the Gurindji Struggle Timothy Neale , 2016 single work review essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 386 2016; (p. 13-14)
'he iconography of Indigenous land rights in Australia is fundamentally deceptive. Take, for example, the famous photograph of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring red sand from his hand into that of Gurindji leader Vincent Lingiari on 16 August 1975. In the image, the white emissary from Canberra – pink-fleshed in a wool suit and Windsor knot – appears to bestow something substantial. Lingiari’s left hand holds papers which, moments before, Whitlam described as ‘proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people’, while the earth that fills Lingiari’s right hand, Whitlam avowed, is ‘a sign that we restore them to you and your children forever’. The whole scene, for good reasons, resembles the ancient European ritual of ‘livery in deed’ in which the transfer of soil or a branch stands in as material testimony to the transfer of more ethereal legal rights.' (Introduction)
April in Nonfiction Sarah Burnside , 2017 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , April 2017;
Locality and Legacy in Indigenous History Now Andonis Piperoglou , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 14 no. 3 2017; (p. 498-502)

'Over the past decade there has been a burgeoning interest in compiling material that looks back at early settler-colonial interactions with Indigenous peoples. There has also been an increased interest in historically examining the protest movements that defined Indigenous politics from the 1960s onwards. In visual and performing arts, in novels and poems, in documentary and feature films and in public and academic history, investigations have focused, with more critical lenses, on the localised specificities and cultural legacies of Indigenous experiences. In Living with Locals: Early Europeans’ Experience of Indigenous Life by John Maynard and Victoria Haskins, and A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-Off by Charlie Ward, two very different explorations of Indigenous history are presented. One centres on localised examples of early European settlers who lived with Indigenous peoples. The other focuses on the cultural legacy left behind by the Gurindji people’s struggle for economic, political and cultural self-determination. Each, in its own distinct way, is a welcome and refreshing addition to Indigenous historical inquiry. They are both balanced, intriguing and sophisticated, and there is little doubt that they are important contributions to a historical field that is comfortably expanding.' (Introduction)

[Review Essay] A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-Off Mickey Dewar , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 48 no. 2 2017; (p. 296-297)

'Charlie Ward’s A Handful of Sand is an epic historical work, meticulously researched and beautifully written, with at its heart the events that shaped the lives of the Gurindji in the lead-up and aftermath of the historic walk-off. Ward takes us through the events in close detail that surround the iconic moment in 1975 when an Australian Prime Minister passed a ‘handful of sand’ to a Gurindji elder.'  (Introduction)

Last amended 4 Jun 2020 08:21:43
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