y separately published work icon Gunderbooka : A Stone Country Story selected work   non-fiction   oral history  
Issue Details: First known date: 2000... 2000 Gunderbooka : A Stone Country Story
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'George Main writes with an eye for detail and a deep feeling and sense of involvement with Gunderbooka and its people and how they were shaped by it. People have left their tracks on the land as Aboriginal art and cultural sites, fences and homesteads. A new environment would emerge yet the character of Gunderbooka has prevailed.

This is so from the first Aboriginal people, to the European pastoralists, contemporary conservation managers and the Aboriginal people who now manage Gunderbooka again. Is this a complete circle or a continuum paced by powerful landscape? It is the unfolding of the land and its people.

Something else has also been achieved along the way. Those of us whose history started with Captain Cook died in abject boredom somewhere around Governor MacQuarie and are reminded that our history is much richer, much longer and more meaningful. We do go back a long way.

George takes us there with a history that starts with Aboriginal people and megafauna, 30,000 years ago. The European newcomers were impatient people with expectations born of another hemisphere, except for some, who could see other futures. Environmental histories such as Gunderbooka will be part of an emerging realisation that we still have a lot to learn about this truly wonderful country and that there are other paths on which to walk forward.' (Source: back cover)

Notes

  • In this book, Goerge Main draws on the knowledge and statements of Aboriginal Elder's Bill Ellwood (q.v.), Elsie Jones (q.v.), Hero Black, Gracie Williams, Billy Coleman, Evelyn Crawford (q.v.), Ross Hampton, Jerry Perrin, Jimmie Barker (q.v.), and George Wilson.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

The Tree and Its Voices : What the Casuarina Says Barbara Holloway , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , Summer vol. 1 no. 2011;
'The tree known popularly and scientifically as the casuarina has been consistently noticed for the sounds made as wind passes through its unusual foliage of needles and leaf scales. The acoustic experience of the casuarina — with subspecies found throughout Australia — has been represented as 'haunted', 'grieving' and voicing the secret language of initiates. This essay traces intriguing conceptual and aesthetic representations of the 'voice' and its listeners found across both Aboriginal and white Australian cultures in traditional English verse, Aboriginal prose narrative, accounts of cultural practices, and hybrid blends of all three. The essay adopts the notion of 'listening to listening' to set out the many forms of story the tree's sounds generate their contribution to identifying places, and to suggest a specific Aboriginal song-line appears to underlie the divergent replications of tree-'voice' across southern Australia.' (Author's abstract)
The Tree and Its Voices : What the Casuarina Says Barbara Holloway , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , Summer vol. 1 no. 2011;
'The tree known popularly and scientifically as the casuarina has been consistently noticed for the sounds made as wind passes through its unusual foliage of needles and leaf scales. The acoustic experience of the casuarina — with subspecies found throughout Australia — has been represented as 'haunted', 'grieving' and voicing the secret language of initiates. This essay traces intriguing conceptual and aesthetic representations of the 'voice' and its listeners found across both Aboriginal and white Australian cultures in traditional English verse, Aboriginal prose narrative, accounts of cultural practices, and hybrid blends of all three. The essay adopts the notion of 'listening to listening' to set out the many forms of story the tree's sounds generate their contribution to identifying places, and to suggest a specific Aboriginal song-line appears to underlie the divergent replications of tree-'voice' across southern Australia.' (Author's abstract)
Last amended 12 Oct 2020 15:16:37
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