Cirrus@Austlit

'Aboriginal heritage and the natural environment need to be at the centre of national reconstruction.'

'Stan Grant’s comment on the prolonged booing of the Australian Rules football star Adam Goodes – featured in Daniel Gordon’s new documentary, The Australian Dream (produced by Grant himself) – has attracted much interest, including more than one million hits on one website:

We heard a sound that was very familiar to us. We heard a howl. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering, and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, ‘You’re not welcome.’' (Introduction)

'It is an honour to address this Australian Academy of the Humanities conference on Human Rights and Humanitarianism, though I rarely frame my own creative work in terms of ‘Human Rights’. I can’t remember the last time I approached the blank page thinking ‘Social Justice’ or ‘Social Change’ either. It’s surprising then, that a word like ‘Decolonisation’ can be appropriate, particularly if ‘we … understand decolonisation as the unravelling of assumed certainties and the re-imagining and re-negotiating of common futures.’' (Introduction)

'A kooky tale of the author's recollections, feelings and observations in nature and star gazing in Styles Park (Katherine) under the cocky apple tree over a 4 week period in the NT.'  (Publication summary)

'This story comes from the wise and ancient language of the First People of the Western Australian south coast. Noorn is a story of alliances between humans and other living creatures, in this case a snake. It tells of how protective relationships can be nurtured by care and respect.' (Publication summary)

'This story comes from the wise and ancient language of the First People of the Western Australian south coast. A boy goes looking for his uncle. He discovers family and home at the ocean’s edge, and finds himself as well. Ngaawily Nop is a story of country and family and belonging.'  (Publication summary)

'From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a work charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years ...

'Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.

'But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged.

'We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. This is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.' (Publication summary)

'An Aboriginal girl, lost and empty after the death of her mother, discovers her past in an unlikely place.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A young man - scarcely more than a boy - stands on a rock beside the deep sea. A whale surfaces next to him, almost within reach. I can't say if the boy knows the whale, but he knows of the whale: all his life he's watched families of them travel along this coast. Recently, he learned the words of one such journey.' (Publication abstract)