Cirrus@Austlit

'This is the first collection to span the diverse range of Black Australian writings. Thirty-six Aboriginal and Islander authors have contributed, including David Unaipon, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Gerry Bostock, Ruby Langford, Robert Bropho, Jack Davis, Hyllus Maris, William Ferguson, Sally Morgan, Mudrooroo Narogin and Archie Weller. Many more are represented through community writings such as petitions and letters.

Collected over six years from all the states and territories of Australia, Paperbark ranges widely across time and genre from the 1840s to the present, from transcriptions of oral literature to rock opera. Prose, poetry, song, drama and polemic are accompanied by the selected artworks of Jimmy Pike, and an extensive, up-to-date bibliography.The voices of Black Australia speak with passion and power in this challenging and important anthology.' Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A fictional account of one woman's journey to find her family and heritage, Caprice won the 1990 David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writers. Its publication marked the beginning of Doris Pilkington Garimara's illustrious writing career.

Set in the towns, pastoral stations and orphanage-styled institutions of Western Australia, this story brings together the lives of three generations of Mardu women. The narrator Kate begins her journey with the story of her grandmother Lucy, a domestic servant, then traces the short and tragic life of her mother Peggy.

Kate was born into the institutionalised world of the Settlement, taught Christian doctrine and trained for a career as a domestic. Gradually and painfully she sheds this narrowly prescribed identity, as she sets out on the pilgrimage home.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

'From the riotous picnic races to the famous Mt Isa rodeo, from childhood in the yumba to gutsy outback pubs, Unbranded presents a strikingly original vision of Australia. With a rollicking cast of stockmen, shearers, barmaids and tourists, this novel is the story of three men. Sandy is a white man; Bindi, a Murri; Mulga is related on his mother's side to Bindi, and on his Irish father's side to Sandy. Their saga . and enduring friendship . covers forty years in the mulga country of the far west. It tells how Sandy achieves his dream of owning a cattle empire; how Bindi regains part of his tribal lands for his people, and how Mulga finally sits down to write about their shared experiences. Mulga's journey also brings him face-to-face with the dark side of urban despair and his people's struggle with alcohol...' (Source: WorldCat website)

'Language is power. It is used to describe and direct events fictional and true. This book describes how historians have manufactured a flattering Australian race relations history. Even today shameful colonial attitudes prevail - a new colonialism has emerged through our language.

'Conned! challenges established perceptions of indigenous Australians or Koories, as the author prefers to name Aborigines. Dr Fesl, a recognised linguist and Koorie culture specialist, brings unique insight to the suppressive role and divisive politics of language - a dilemma that affects all Australians, black and white. She makes clear the invisible text which creates a false and oppressive image of Koories as being inferior and in need of paternalistic aid.' (Publisher's blurb)

'When Ruby Langford Ginibi was eight years old, her father collected his daughters from the Box Ridge mission and drove them to safety out of reach of the white authorities and the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. Today an established author and Aboriginal activist, Ruby travels back to her home in Bundjalung country to trace and record the history of her community, her roots. The reader is taken aboard on the journey home, down the backroads of northern New South Wales into the homes and conversations of cousins, aunties, and tribal elders. The experience is direct and the feelings are shared. Ruby Langford Ginibi writes with the humour, exuberance and unbending truth for which her first book, Don't Take Your Love to Town, won such renown.' (Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'Unforgettable characters emerge from this vintage Herb Wharton collection which ranges from city to bush, from tall tales to amusing parables. There's Rainbow Jack the opal digger; Dr Roo, who when the dingbats are upon him boxes his own shadow; and stockmen with nicknames such as Wild Duck, Grease Paint and Diamond Jim.

'Along with campfire yarns and memories drawn from childhood are stories from Herb's other life in the big city and on the literary trail.' (Publication summary)

'The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Nugi Garimara Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal family at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth...

The three girls - aged 8, 11 and 14 - managed to escape from the settlement's repressive conditions and brutal treatment. Barefoot without provisions or maps, they set out to find the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it passed near their home in the north. Tracked by native police and search planes, they hid in terror, surviving on bush tucker, desperate to return to the world they knew.

The journey to freedom - longer than many of the legendary walks of [the Australian nation's] explorer heroes... told from family recollections, letters between the authorities and the Aboriginal Protector, and ... newspaper reports of the runaway children.' Source: Publisher's blurb

'These poems are anything but motionless. Their emotions cut, determined to map out another possibility, a place of personal and social reconciliation.' (Source: Back cover)

"I haven't got a 'boyfriend', Mum." "Fine way to be carrying on then, out all Sat'dy night with a strange fella..." "Muuum. " "Don't you marm me, my girl. When I was your age I wasn't out running around with any stray bloke with a flash car and the gift of the gab. "And when I'm your age," thought Sue maliciously, "I won't be ringing up my kids to scab money and make their lives a misery into the bargain."

'Sue Wilson, young and Aboriginal, escapes her "too-large, too-poor family in a too-small" north Queensland town for Logan City's frontier sprawl. Entering "the mythic world of Work" she discovers that the view from behind the bar is less than glamorous, but pays the rent. When she meets Roger the good times begin to roll until she finds herself starring in a feature with medium level violence. Melissa Lucashenko's first novel makes no apologies. With direct and gutsy language, her characters live their lives in the shadows cast by indifferent affluence.'

(Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'Our Land is Our Life is a rare opportunity to sit down with Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Marcia Langton, Michael Dodson and Patrick Dodson, Noel Pearson, Lois O'Donoghue, Michael Mansell, Peter Yu, and many more whose names appear in the daily media. In this collection the most influential indigenous leaders of our time provide analyses and reveal their passions for their people and land, and for the Australia we all want to call home. Our Land is Our Life is inspired by the twentieth anniversary of the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act, and coincides with the final year for lodgement of claims. As the ground is shifting beneath indigenous Australia, in a political sense, there is an even greater need to stand firm on the central issue of land rights. To forsake our land is to deny not just ourselves but also the future of Australia, socially, environmentally and culturally. This collection features valuable archival material, including photographs and cartoons, as well as landmark documents.

'In this brilliant debut novel, Alexis Wright evokes city and outback, deepening our understanding of human ambition and failure, and making the timeless heart and soul of this country pulsate on the page. Black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic's mission. With her political awareness raised by work with the city-based Aboriginal Coalition, Mary visits the old mission in the northern Gulf country, place of her mother's and grandmother's suffering. Mary's return reignites community anxieties, and the Council of Elders again turn to their spirit world.' (From the publisher's website.)

'In contemporary language and imagery, this poetry collection reflects a deep and abiding Aboriginality and an understanding that bridges past and present, nature and technology, the traditional and the modern. Chosen as a highly-commended entry in the David Unaipon Awards for unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers. Land Window, looks out onto the world, proclaiming humanity's eternal connection to the earth.' (Source: Google Books website)

'Angry young Koori Darcy Mango is on parole, and looking for his mob in Northern New South Wales. Befriending the Menzies family wasn't at all what he had in mind, but then neither was the old house hidden in the bush near Desperation Creek. Why does the camera from the house take pictures of the past? It's Darcy's fate to find out.' (Source: UQP website)

'On the surface there's not much to distinguish Tim's life from any other on the fringe- where dope, booze and women are his pleasure as well as his pain. He has family in the bush, and the lives of his city friends are transacted in the face of poverty and police harassment. It is only in Tim's relationship with the Old Man that we glimpse another and little known world where the rules are different, but so too the retribution.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

'Roo Glover has two highly desirable talents - he can fight, and he can run like the clappers. In the inner-city's harsh code there are losers and survivors, and Roo's a survivor. He's made it through adoption, through juvenile detention, through poverty. He's an athlete in training, aching towards the dream of Olympic qualification. He's even coping with being white in the turbulent Aboriginal family of his girlfriend. But when cousin Stanley dies in custody, and Roo finds his father the same week, trouble starts to catch up with him.' (Source: UQP Website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'The Yumba, an Aboriginal settlement, is home to Herbie, his brothers,

sisters, relations and friends on the outskirts of town. From his back

door the view of his playground stretches beyond the banks of the

Warrego River, as far as the eye can see. The fun-loving Herbie learns

his culture from both Aboriginal and white worlds: from his tribal

elders and from the local townies. For Herbie his Yumba is a village

peopled with friends and family, who keep an eye on him and his mates.

But there's always escape to the surrounding hopbush plain, a larrikin's

paradise. Herbie's rollicking adventures range from school-age antics

to his teenage years as a stockman and, briefly-on into the present and

his wry observations in travelling the world as an author.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

In this important and beautifully written book, Aileen Moreton-Robinson gives us a compelling analysis of white Australian feminism seen through Indigenous Australian women's eyes. She unpacks the unspoken normative subject of feminism as white middle-class woman, where whitemess marks their position of power and privilege vis-a-vis Indigenous women, and where silence about whitemess sustains the exercise of that power. And she examines the consequences of practices for Indigenous women and White women.' (Source: Preface, Talkin' Up to the White Women, 2000)

'Robert Lowe's affection and regard for "The Mish", a property in Victoria's southwest, originally an Aboriginal mission, is warmly conveyed in this candid memoir. In the 1950s and 60s when Robert was growing up, "The Mish" was a close knit community made up of the Aboriginal descendants of Framlingham Aboriginal Mission Station, founded in 1865. Robert's adventurous boyhood was a secured and unfettered time spent with his siblings and cousins enjoying hunting, fishing and eel trapping.

'Teachings by the community elders instilled in him a connection to the land and spirituality he would in turn pass on to following generations. When Robert and his bride leave "The Mish", a new chapter begins in a nearby town where acceptance and respect are hard won.'

Source: Publisher's blurb

'leaving behind neon nights and misspent passions, these poems take to the highway with the muse riding shotgun' (Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'...always remember where you're from... To the Aboriginal Families of Mundra this saying brings either comfort or pain. To Nana Vida it is what binds the generations. To the unwilling savant Archie Corella it portends a fate too cruel to name. For Sophie Salte, whose woman's body and child's mind make her easy prey, nothing matters while her sister Murilla is there to watch over her.

For Murilla, fierce protector and unlikely friend to Caroline Drysdale, wife of the town patriarch, what matters is survival. In a town with a history of vigilante raids, missing persons and unsolved murders, survival can be all that matters'. (Source: back cover, 2002 edition)

'The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Nugi Garimara Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal family at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth...

The three girls - aged 8, 11 and 14 - managed to escape from the settlement's repressive conditions and brutal treatment. Barefoot without provisions or maps, they set out to find the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it passed near their home in the north. Tracked by native police and search planes, they hid in terror, surviving on bush tucker, desperate to return to the world they knew.

The journey to freedom - longer than many of the legendary walks of [the Australian nation's] explorer heroes... told from family recollections, letters between the authorities and the Aboriginal Protector, and ... newspaper reports of the runaway children.' Source: Publisher's blurb

'Doris Pilkington Garimara was born on traditional birthing ground under a wintamarra tree. This is her life story which follows on from her mother, Molly Craig's story in ~Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. Doris begins with the basic migration of her Mardu ancestors from the Western Australian desert to the cattle stations and settlements on its fringes.

Generations later, living in a workers' camp with her family on Balfour Downs Station, three-year old Doris' life is forever changed when she is removed by authorities to Moore River Native Settlement. This institution, for children judged to be identifiably of mixed race, was the place Molly had so famously escaped from a decade before.

The life of an institutional orphan, as seen through the eyes of a child, is movingly revealed... Leaving behind the regimentation of assigned routines and endless regulations, Doris goes to Perth to train as a nurse's aide but the racist culture of an institutional upbringing leaves an indelible mistrust of her own people. This is the obstacle she has to overcome when as a wife and mother she makes the courageous but difficult choice to find her mother and father, and to begin the journey to reclaim her Mardu heritage.' Source: Publisher's blurb

'The first step on Ruth's journey is towards freedom. After twenty-two years under government control as an inmate of Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission, she marries and enters an inviting yet uncertain world in the nearby settlement with her husband Joe. The settlement — with its origins as a camp for displaced Aboriginal families, its system of food rations and shortage of housing and jobs — is a difficult start for the young couple. Humour, a supportive circle of family and friends and Ruth's own resourcefulness prevail, and eventually the Hegartys achieve the basics of a house for their growing family.

The invasive powers of the Native Affairs Department continue to affect their lives even when, years later, they move to the city. Ruth's determination and irrepressible sense of fairness ... characterise a life vigorously committed to social justice and community causes.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

'These poems pulse with the language and images of a mangrove-lined river city, the beckoning highway, the just-glimpsed muse, the tug of childhood and restless ancestors. For the first time Samuel Wagan Watson's poetry has been collected into this stunning volume, which includes a final section of all new work.' (Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'This absorbing and personal account of Wik activist Jean George Awumpun offers a rare understanding of Aboriginal identity and traditional land. To illustrate her proud Alngith Wikwaya beginnings, Awumpun's early history is told through family member and Alngith descendant Fiona Doyle. This ancestral history combines with the story of Awumpun's struggle in the Wik native title claims, which advanced the earlier Mabo Decision onto mainland Australia.

Using photographs, traditionally inspired art and language terms, Fiona Doyle invites us into the heart of Cape York's Wikwaya country.' Source: Publisher's blurb

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

'This ... collection of stories features a foreword by Dr Pam Johnston that places Ruby’s anecdotes in the context of a country which seems incapable of healing its past or of creating a better future for Indigenous people. Featuring the best stories from Ruby’s Real Deadly, plus many unpublished gems dating as far back as 1992, All My Mob’s portrayal of family life, ‘home’, and life as an Aborigine in today’s Australia is fascinating, often confronting and unforgettable.' (Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'A collection of short stories that encapsulates the story of the Aboriginal narrator, her partner Antman, their dog Fleabag and their life in travelling in rural Australia.'  (Source: Narragunnawali resource)

'Don’t Take Your Love to Town is a story of courage in the face of poverty and tragedy. Ruby recounts losing her mother when she was six, growing up in a mission in northern New South Wales and leaving home when she was fifteen. She lived in tin huts and tents in the bush and picked up work on the land while raising nine children virtually single-handedly. Later she struggled to make ends meet in the Koori areas of Sydney. Ruby is an amazing woman whose sense of humour has endured through all the hardships she has experienced.' (Source UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'My story cannot be painted onto a canvas - it is skin painting.

Brave, haunting and evocative, this powerful volume is poetry as memoir. From her early experiences in an institution and the effect of this on her family to the illustration of her strength as an adult, Elizabeth Hodgson helps make a slice of Aboriginal experience accessible and resonant. Skin Painting explores themes of art, identity, sexuality and loneliness. It is both universal and intimated, honest and important.'

Source: Publisher's blurb

'In the Aboriginal missions of far northern Australia, it was a battle between saving souls and saving traditional culture.

'Every Secret Thing is a rough, tough, hilarious portrayal of the Bush Mob and the Mission Mob, and the hapless clergy trying to convert them. In these tales, everyone is fair game.

'At once playful and sharp, Marie Munkara's wonderfully original stories cast a taunting new light on the mission era in Australia.' (From the publisher's website.)

'In January 1966, Kate Howarth gave birth to a healthy baby boy at St Margaret's Home for unwed mothers in Sydney. In the months before the birth, and the days after, she resisted intense pressure to give up her son for adoption, becoming one of the few women to ever leave the institution with her baby. She was only sixteen years old.

'What inspired such courage?

'In Ten Hail Marys, Kate Howarth vividly recounts the first seventeen years of her life in Sydney's slums and suburbs and in rural New South Wales. Abandoned by her mother as a baby and then by "Mamma", her volatile grandmother, as a young girl, Kate was shunted between Aboriginal relatives and expected to grow up fast. A natural storyteller, she describes a childhood beset by hardship, abuse, profound grief and poverty, but buoyed with the hope that one day she would make a better life for herself.

'Frank, funny and incredibly moving, Ten Hail Marys is the compelling true story of a childhood lost, and a young woman's hard-won self-possession.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Hours after rejecting the Corrowa People's native title claim on Brisbane's Meston Park, Justice Bruce Brosnan is brutally murdered in his home. Days later, lawyers against the claim are also found dead.

Aboriginal people were once prohibited from entering Brisbane's city limits at night, and Meston Park stood on the boundary. The Corrowa's matriarch, Ethel Cobb, is convinced the murders are the work of an ancient assassin who has returned to destroy the boundary, but Aboriginal lawyer Miranda Eversely isn't so sure.

When the Premier is kidnapped, the pressure to find the killer intensifies ... While the investigation forces Detective Sergeant Jason Matthews to confront his buried heritage, Miranda battles a sense of personal failure at the Corrowa's defeat. How far will it take her to the edge of self-destruction?' Source: www.uqp.com.au/ (Sighted 25/03/2011).

'A moving memoir about living across two cultures. Growing up "on country" on the west coast of Queensland's Cape York Peninsula in the 1970s and '80s, Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung had an idyllic traditional life.

At the age of 16, she decided to pursue her dream of performing and moved to Sydney to attend the NAISDA Dance College. There she studied with the legendary Page brothers before they founded Bangarra Dance Theatre and met her future husband and father of her three daughters.

But the missing piece of her life was her father. As a young woman, she finds her father and carves out a fragile relationship with him. This inspires her to better understand her Austrian ancestry and how it meshes with her Indigenous identity.

Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung is the model of a modern woman: mother and professional; performer and creator; teacher and student, urban dweller and remote community inhabitant. As such she shares the joys and challenges that come with growing up in a divided community and carving out a career as a solo parent.

Double Native is a powerful and candid memoir that offers a rare insight into the burgeoning years of the contemporary Indigenous dance movement and what it means to straddle two cultures.' Source: http://uqp.uq.edu.au/ (Sighted 16/03/2012).

'Lesley Williams was forced to leave the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement and her family at a young age to work as a domestic servant. Apart from pocket money, Lesley never saw her wages – they were kept ‘safe’ for her and for countless others just like her. She was taught not to question her life, until desperation made her start to wonder, where is all that money she earned? And so began a nine-year journey for answers.'

'Inspired by her mother’s quest, a teenage Tammy Williams entered a national writing competition with an essay about injustice. The winning prize took Tammy and Lesley to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and ultimately to the United Nations in Geneva. Along the way, they found courage they never thought they had and friendship in the most unexpected places.' (Source: On-line)

'A vital Aboriginal perspective on colonial storytelling

'Indigenous lawyer and writer Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the local Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island in 1836. In this deeply personal book, Behrendt uses Eliza’s tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people – and indigenous people of other countries – have been portrayed in their colonizers’ stories. Citing works as diverse as Robinson Crusoe and Coonardoo, she explores the tropes in these accounts, such as the supposed promiscuity of Aboriginal women, the Europeans’ fixation on cannibalism, and the myth of the noble savage. Ultimately, Behrendt shows how these stories not only reflect the values of their storytellers but also reinforce those values – which in Australia led to the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the laws enforced against them. ' (Publication summary)

'Ten years after the much-acclaimed Swallow the Air, Tara June Winch returns with an extraordinary new collection of stories'

'A single mother resorts to extreme measures to protect her young son. A Nigerian student undertakes a United Nations internship in the hope of a better future. A recently divorced man starts a running group with members of an online forum for recovering addicts. '

'Ranging from New York to Istanbul, from Pakistan to Australia, these unforgettable stories chart the distances in their characters’ lives – whether they have grown apart from the ones they love, been displaced from their homeland, or are struggling to reconcile their dreams with reality. A collection of prodigious depth and variety, After the Carnage marks the impressive evolution of one of our finest young writers.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'In this unforgettable new collection, Tony Birch introduces a cast of characters from all walks of life. These remarkable and surprising stories capture common people caught up in the everyday business of living and the struggle to survive. From two single mothers on the most unlikely night shift to a homeless man unexpectedly faced with the miracle of a new life, Birch’s stories are set in gritty urban refuges and battling regional communities. His deftly drawn characters find unexpected signs of hope in a world where beauty can be found on every street corner – a message on a T-shirt, a friend in a stray dog or a star in the night sky.

'Common People shines a light on human nature and how the ordinary kindness of strangers can have extraordinary results. With characteristic insight and restraint, Tony Birch reinforces his reputation as a master storyteller.'

Source: Publication summary.
 

‘When he was in gaol, he’d begun to prepare himself for the fight of his life, a showdown with the policeman, McWilliams … he’d face life with death, and see who blinked first.’ 

'Blackie and Rips are fresh out of prison when they set off on a road trip back to Wiradjuri country with their mate Carlos. Blackie is out for revenge against the cop who put him in prison on false grounds. He is also craving to reconnect with his grandmother’s country. 

'Driven by his hunger for drugs and payback, Blackie reaches dark places of both mystery and beauty as he searches for peace. He is willing to pay for that peace with his own life. 

'Part road-movie, part ‘Koori-noir’, Dancing Home announces an original and darkly funny new voice.'

[source: Publisher's website]

'‘That’s the way it is with us mob. We were brought up to talk kind of sideways. That’s the respectful, true Aboriginal way.’

'Reg Dodd grew up at Finniss Springs, on striking desert country bordering South Australia’s Lake Eyre. For the Arabunna and for many other Aboriginal people, Finniss Springs has been a homeland and a refuge. It has also been a cattle station, an Aboriginal mission, a battlefield, a place of learning and a living museum.

'With his long-time friend and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon, Dodd reflects on his upbringing in a cross-cultural environment that defied social conventions of the time. They also write candidly about the tensions surrounding power, authority and Indigenous knowledge that have defined the recent decades of this resource-rich area.

'Talking Sideways is part history, part memoir and part cultural road-map. Together, Dodd and McKinnon reveal the unique history of this extraordinary place and share their concerns and their hopes for its future.' (Publication summary)