Cirrus@Austlit

'No publisher or literary agent could have dreamt up or commissioned this remarkable book. It is wholly unexpected and original. It is about some Yolngu clans in north-east Arnhem Land, a group of Vietnam veterans, and an anthropologist named Neville White, who happens to be an old friend of one of Australia’s finest writers, Don Watson. Watson observes Neville, who systematically observes the Yolngu, who are regularly visited by the vets. It sounds like a lugubrious farce and sometimes it reads that way. But it is a deeply serious enquiry into questions at the heart of Australian history, politics, and identity.' (Introduction)

'Across Australia today, exciting work is being done to strengthen and renew Aboriginal languages and their deep associations with Country. In those parts of the continent where the history of dispossession has been most traumatic, language regeneration calls for research and reconstruction, for the rediscovery of the old words for places, features, and life itself. Gregory Day’s new book is a distinguished and discerning quest for the lore and language of his beloved place. It eloquently reflects on what it means for a non-Indigenous fifth-generation Australian to seek to live ‘in a properly symbiotic way, in this soil’. Words Are Eagles is more than a book of ‘selected writings’: it is a sustained manifesto for how to think and feel one’s way into Australian nature, place, and history following invasion and at a time of global environmental crisis.' (Introduction)   

'IN JULY 2019, the Queensland Government launched a series of community consultations as part of its Path to Treaty initiative. The then Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships explained that ‘when Queensland was settled, there was no treaty agreement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first custodians’. ‘First Nations peoples,’ continued the government statement, ‘were displaced from their land without any negotiation, resulting in political, economic and social inequalities that continue to this day.’ On 11 November 2019, one of twenty-four public consultations around the state was held in Birdsville in the Channel Country of south-western Queensland. At the Birdsville meeting to discuss Treaty, Mithaka Elder Betty Gorringe said just one thing from the back of the room: We already had a treaty: the Debney Peace. It’s in Alice’s books.' (Introduction)

'Mandy Martin, Australian artist'

“I would like to be read by the people I went to school with,” said the historian Ken Inglis. “And by my parents. And by my children.” (Introduction)

'Alex Miller is a novelist who has always welcomed a conversation with history. During a period in our national literary life when there have been occasional flashes of tension between history and fiction, Miller’s work has luminously transcended these categories in a way only achieved by the greatest literature.' (Introduction)

'George Seddon helped his readers see Australia from the inside'

'The author’s compelling yet curiously old-fashioned account of Indigenous history has inspired and empowered'

'I want to take you on a journey from the planet to the parish, from the global to the local, from the Earth in space to the earth beneath our feet, from the lonely glowing speck of dust at the edge of the galaxy to the soil that we kneel upon and sift through our fingers and to which we ultimately return, dust to dust. These are contrasting perspectives of our home - one vertiginous, the other intimate; one from the outside in deep space and the other from the inside in deep time - on very different scales but still connected. And we have to see them as connected if we are to live respectfully and sustainably as part of nature.'' (Publication abstract)

'How Geoffrey Bolton’s environmental history made a difference'

'Writing good history is a high-wire act of balance and grace. Historians scour their own societies for vestiges of past worlds, for cracks and fissures in the pavement of the present, and for the shimmers and hauntings of history in everyday action.

'In The Art of Time Travel, eminent historian and award-winning author Tom Griffiths explores the craft of discipline and imagination that is history. Through portraits of fifteen historians at work, including Inga Clendinnen, Judith Wright, Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, he observes how a body of work is constructed out of a life-long dialogue between past evidence and present experience.

'Riveting, beautiful and elegantly written, this landmark book conjures fresh insights into the history of Australia and revitalises our sense of the historian’s craft – what Tom Griffiths calls “the art of time travel”.' (Publication summary)

'For Eric Rolls, historical writing needed to serve the future, writes Tom Griffiths'