Delving deep into the Australian landscape and the environmental challenges we face, Fire Country is a powerful account from Indigenous land management expert Victor Steffensen on how the revival of cultural burning practices, and improved ‘reading’ of country, could help to restore our land.Victor’s story is unassuming and honest, while demonstrating the incredibly sophisticated and complex cultural knowledge that has been passed down to him, which he wants to share with others. Fire Country is written in a way that reflects the nature of yarning, and while some of the knowledge shared in this book may not align with Western views, there is much evidence that, if adopted, it could greatly benefit all Australians.CONTENT WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this audiobook may contain names of deceased persons. Read more

What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart - sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect. Read more

The moving story of an Indigenous woman who beat disadvantage and violence to become one of Australia's most influential political voices. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was nine months pregnant and due to give birth the night she attended her high school formal. With her baby tucked in her arms, she completed year 12 from her hospital bed. Early in their relationship, she took her future husband, Colin, to the Alice Springs morgue to identify the body of a family member who'd been killed.Nothing about the life of this passionate and steely Warlpiri woman could ever be described as ordinary.In this remarkable memoir, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price candidly recalls her journey from the remote outback communities of Yuendumu and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory - a young girl with big dreams and the red dust of her ancestors under her fingernails - to the corridors of Canberra and beyond.Honest, raw and at times heartbreaking, Matters of the Heart is a deeply personal reflection of how a young Indigenous woman, growing up surrounded by violence and tragedy, beat the odds to become one of the most powerful political voices of our time. 'I've been to hell and back, and I've survived.' Read more

This extraordinary story of courage and faith is based on the actual experiences of three girls who fled from the repressive life of Moore River Native Settlement, following along the rabbit-proof fence back to their homelands. Assimilationist policy dictated that these girls be taken from their kin and their homes in order to be made white. Settlement life was unbearable with its chains and padlocks, barred windows, hard cold beds, and horrible food. Solitary confinement was doled out as regular punishment. The girls were not even allowed to speak their language. Of all the journeys made since white people set foot on Australian soil, the journey made by these girls born of Aboriginal mothers and white fathers speaks something to everyone. Read more

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A Quill & Quire Book of the Year A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year A Maclean’s 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter“An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family, identity and love.” —Cherie DimalineIn this bestselling memoir, a son who grew up away from his Indigenous culture takes his Cree father on a trip to the family trapline and finds that revisiting the past not only heals old wounds but creates a new futureThe son of a Cree father and a white mother, David A. Robertson grew up with virtually no awareness of his Indigenous roots. His father, Dulas—or Don, as he became known—lived on the trapline in the bush in Manitoba, only to be transplanted permanently to a house on the reserve, where he couldn’t speak his language, Swampy Cree, in school with his friends unless in secret. David’s mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town that had no Indigenous people until Don arrived as the new United Church minister. They married and had three sons, whom they raised unconnected to their Indigenous history. David grew up without his father’s teachings or any knowledge of his early experiences. All he had was “blood memory”: the pieces of his identity ingrained in the fabric of his DNA, pieces that he has spent a lifetime putting together. It has been the journey of a young man becoming closer to who he is, who his father is and who they are together, culminating in a trip back to the trapline to reclaim their connection to the land. Black Water is a memoir about intergenerational trauma and healing, about connection and about how Don’s life informed David’s own. Facing up to a story nearly erased by the designs of history, father and son journey together back to the trapline at Black Water and through the past to create a new future.  Read more

Before he was a businessman, senator, and governor, Ricardo J. Bordallo was simply “Ricky,” a young CHamoru man from Guam, the island he loved. The first volume of a two-part series, Ricky: A Life Worth Sharing is Bordallo’s account of his early life, as told to his cousin C. Sablan Gault. From an idyllic village childhood to the horrors of the occupation during WWII and the shifting cultural and political landscape of an island transformed in the aftermath of war, Ricky explores the formative experiences of one of Guam’s most well-known public figures. Read more

A Stolen Generations story of astounding courage: three Aboriginal girls, taken from their mothers, escape barefoot back to their beloved homeland in East Pilbara. This is the true account of Nugi Garimara’ s mother, Molly, made legendary by the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. In 1931 Molly led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1600-kilometre walk across remote Western Australia. Aged eight, eleven and fourteen, they escaped the confinement of a government institution for Aboriginal children removed from their families. Barefoot, without provisions or maps, tracked by Native Police and search planes, the girls followed the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it would lead them home. Their journey – longer than many of the celebrated treks of recognised explorers – reveals a past more cruel than we could ever imagine. Read more

In her memoir Too Afraid to Cry, published in 2013, Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann related how she had been tricked away from her mother as a baby, repeating the trauma her mother had suffered when she was taken from her grandmother many years before. Eckermann in turn had to give her own child up for adoption. In her new poetry collection, Inside My Mother, she explores the distance between the generations created by such experiences, felt as an interminable void in its darkest aspects, marked by sadness, withdrawal, yearning and mistrust, but in other ways a magical place 'beyond the imagination', lit by dreams and visions of startling intensity, populated by symbolic presences and scenes of ritual and commemoration, chief amongst them the separation and reunion of mother and child. Though the emotions are strong, they are expressed simply and with a sense of significance in nature which reminds one of the poetry of Oodgero Noonuccal, whose successor Eckermann is. Read more

*Stars of the hit television series The Casketeers, as seen on Netflix* Francis and Kaiora Tipene aren't your typical funeral directors. With their famous humour and big-hearted personalities, the TVNZ and Netflix reality TV stars are changing the way we think about death and grief.Life as a Casketeer reveals how Francis and Kaiora grew up in families that had few possessions but were rich with love and tikanga, and how they came to work in their often misunderstood profession. It's also a book about the Maori world view and traditional funeral customs. The Tipenes make death feel less mysterious and life feel more precious.But most of all, Life as a Casketeer is a love story - for whanau, for culture and for each other. It is full of joy and sorrow, tears and laughter. Read more

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 VICTORIAN PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARDS FOR NON-FICTIONImagine the document you have before you is not a book but a map. It is well-used, creased, and folded, so that when you open it, no matter how carefully, something tears and a line that is neither latitude nor longitude opens in the hidden geography of the place you are about to enter.Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, in 2000, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners; the mining companies have arrived; and Aboriginal art has flourished.Comedy and tragedy, familiarity and uncertainty are Mahood’s constant companions as she immerses herself in the life of a small community and in groundbreaking mapping projects. What emerges in Position Doubtful is a revelation of the significance of the land to its people — and of the burden of history.Mahood is an artist of astonishing versatility. She works with words, with paint, with installations, and with performance art. Her writing about her own work and collaborations, and about the work of the desert artists, is profoundly enlightening, making palpable the link between artist and country.This is a beautiful and intense exploration of friendships, landscape, and homecoming. Written with great energy and humour, Position Doubtful offers a unique portrait of the complexities of black and white relations in contemporary Australia.PRAISE FOR KIM MAHOOD‘[Mahood] is a talented writer whose mastery of the language is absolute. The combination of an artist’s eye, a mapmaker’s precision, and a wordsmith’s playfulness makes for a work of captivating beauty … a significant and timely work.’ The Weekend Australian‘An extraordinary excavation of the relationship, past and present, between settlers and indigenous Australians, deeply grounded in this alluring tract of desert, but with relevance for us all.’ The Monthly Read more

“If I Survive.” This thought haunted Lena. Her loved ones were cruelly forced from her arms in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland and perished in Treblinka Death Camp. This is a true story of Holocaust survival. In ww2 books, it is a searing story of human rights abuses and genocide.The story of Nazi Germany and the Jews is a story of anti-Semitism, Nazi concentration camps, gas chambers and World War 11 (wwii). The Warsaw ghetto where the Nazis had imprisoned the Jews was being emptied as Hitler’s Final Solution to murder all of European Jewry was put into action. Lena kept thinking, “It’s my turn next.” As some Jews escaped Treblinka and exposed it as being a death camp not a labour camp, young men and women in the ghetto decided to make a stand.Lena helped in the resistance which became the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by gathering light bulbs from empty houses which could be used for Molotov cocktails. By a miracle, she escaped the ghetto before it became an inferno. But where could she hide? When it was over and she could walk free, the tears she had held back flooded out because she was all alone and there was no one to care that she had survived and no one to go to.Author Barbara Miller adds to Holocaust history and ww2 German history by skilfully weaving her research with Lena’s diary and interviews to bring her ww2 biography to life. Lena helped her companions in hiding to survive with her humour and compassion. She turned 100 in January 2019 and her miraculous story of survival against the odds will inspire you to not give up no matter how dark the time or difficult the situation or cruel the people around you.Download or order now!What are others saying about this remarkable book?This is a compelling, indeed exemplary work, that merges the history of the Holocaust with the live story of one survivor: Lena Goldstein, aged 100, one of the last living witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust.Konrad Kwiet, Emeritus Professor and Resident Historian Sydney Jewish MuseumThis is a truly beautiful collaboration between the author and her subject, who have together produced an invaluable documentation of a unique, moving, life story set against the backdrop of one of the darkest moments in human history. To read "If I Survive" is to meet a remarkable person and to be touched by her intense humanity in an inhuman world.Jeremy Jones AM, former President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and Director, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs CouncilIn this book Barbara Miller tells a powerful, must read story of survival - the story of Lena Goldstein, an elegant, articulate centenarian, a victim of one of the most horrific periods in human history, the Holocaust.Josie Lacey OAM, Author of An Inevitable Path, A Memoir, Life Member Executive Council of Australian Jewry, WIZO, and ECCBarbara Miller has given Lena Goldstein’s personal Holocaust journey the validation it so richly deserves; an eye witness account of a truly inspiring and heroic survivor.Viv Parry, Chairperson, Child Survivors of the Holocaust, MelbourneAnother important book from the celebrated writer Barbara Miller. Expertly researched and skillfully written.Irene Shaland, author of The Dao of Being Jewish and Other Stories: Seeking Jewish narrative all over the World.”It is not often that you commence a book and feel compelled to continue reading until it is finished. Such is the power of “If I survive: Nazi Germany and the Jews” by Barbara Miller. It should be compulsory reading for all students so they can live the concept - “Never Again”.John Searle, Barrister, Melbourne, Former Chairperson, Victorian Equal Opportunity and Equal Rights Commission, President of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria Read more

By the bestselling author of The Ship That Never Was Just after Christmas 1803, convict William Buckley fled an embryonic settlement in the land of the Kulin nation (now the Port Phillip area), to take his chances in the wilderness. A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the six-foot-five former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead, they took him in, and for thirty-two years Buckley lived as a Wadawurrung man, learning his adopted tribe's language, skills and methods to survive. The outside world finally caught up with Buckley in 1835, after John Batman, a bounty hunter from Van Diemen's Land, arrived in the area, seeking to acquire and control the perfect pastureland around the bay. What happened next saw the Wadawurrung betrayed and Buckley eventually broken. The theft of Kulin country would end in the birth of a city. The frontier wars had begun.By the bestselling author of The Ship That Never Was, The Ghost and the Bounty Hunter is a fascinating and poignant true story from Australian colonial history. Read more

'I had lived and hunted with these people, accompanied them on their nomadic wanderings and learned their customs and their languages with the result that I understood and believed in them and resented the injustices under which they had suffered for so long at the hands of the white man and other invaders of their territory.' In 1932-33, Yolngu people living in the Caledon Bay area of north-east Arnhem Land were involved in the killing of five Japanese fishermen and three Europeans. A punitive expedition was proposed to 'teach the Aborigines a lesson'. In response, Donald Thomson, a Melbourne-born anthropologist, offered to investigate the causes of the conflict. After seven months of investigation he persuaded the Federal Government to free the three men convicted of the killings and returned with them to their own country, subsequently spending fifteen months documenting the culture of the region. Whilst in Arnhem Land, Thomson, a superb and enthusiastic photographer, made the most comprehensive photographic record of any fully functioning, self-supporting Aboriginal society that we will ever have. The one hundred and thirty images included in this book cover domestic life, subsistence, house types, material culture, and religious life, providing a uniquely privileged glimpse of life beyond the frontier. Thomson recorded his experiences in newspaper and academic articles, private papers and extended reports to the government. Nicolas Peterson brings this material together as a compelling, highly personal narrative in Thomson's own words. It is a narrative that names all the Aboriginal people involved, presenting them as individuals in a way no other writings of the time do. Through it all Thomson's passionate commitment to Aboriginal rights as defender, critic and advocate, shines through. Read more

A freelance journalist describes his hitchhiking journey across seven thousand miles of Australia's barren outback, recalling the Aborigines, con men, card sharks, pearl divers, and other travellers encountered along the way Read more

Culture is Life is a modern, photographic celebration of the diversity of Indigenous Australians. Pre-eminent Aboriginal photographer Wayne Quilliam has an archive of thousands of images and interviews with Indigenous people across the country.Through the images in this stunning collection, Wayne's work explores the nuances of Indigenous thinking and identity, and focuses on how the First peoples view their place within the contemporary culture of Australia. The people featured in Culture is Life include many high-profile Indigenous Australians, as well as community members of different ages from Tasmania to the Torres Strait, offering insights into the dreams of youth and the reflections of Elders. With various feature sections on significant events such as Sorry Day and the NRL All Stars game, this book is an accessible gateway to better understand and appreciate the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, presented as a stunning and contemporary photo book. Read more

Before the splash, there was the clash of teeth on the spinal column, then the struggle of hooves against the dirt of the banks. The young cowboys could not believe their eyes. Lurching from the billabong, a 12-foot saltwater crocodile grabbed a horse by its neck and pulled it under. Read more

Winner of the 2010 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writing, Purple Threads is a humorous collection of rural yarns by a gifted storyteller. Jeanine Leane grew up on a sheep farm near Gundagai, and the stories are based on her childhood experiences in a house full of fiercely independent women. In between Aunty Boo's surveillance of the local farmers' sheep dip alliance and Aunty Bubby's fireside tales of the Punic Wars, the women offer sage advice to their nieces on growing up as Indigenous girls in a white country town. The cast of strong Aboriginal women in a rural setting gives a fascinating insight into both Aboriginal and rural life. Farming is not an easy pursuit for anyone, but the Aunties take all the challenges in their stride, facing torrential rain, violent neighbours and injured dogs with an equal mix of humour and courage. Read more

Dance, Culture & Self-Discovery: A Journey Through Indigenous WorldsWhen the world of classical ballet collides with the rhythmic heartbeat of indigenous dance, a transformative journey emerges. In Hollow Bone, Gretchen Ward Warren delves deep into a voyage of self-discovery, cultural exploration, and artistic creation. Stepping onto Australia's red terrain, Warren, a celebrated ballet soloist and professor, is forced by unforeseen circumstances down a path of profound awakening. Discovering the rich tapestry of Aboriginal history, culture, and their heart-wrenching struggles, she witnesses echoes of the same pain endured by Native Americans.But where words failed, dance spoke. Harnessing the universal language of movement, Warren created a groundbreaking theatre production - one that brought together Aboriginals of Australia and Native Americans in a symphony of shared stories and dance.Hollow Bone isn't merely a memoir; throughout, Warren provides seductive descriptions of the people and landscapes of Australia and the American Southwest. Often faced with the unexpected and aghast by the tragic history she discovers, she weaves together a tapestry of passion, ignorance, revelation, and the power of art to bridge seemingly insurmountable divides. As Warren grapples with her own biases and confronts the weight of her white guilt, readers are invited on a transformative journey that dances across continents and challenges perceptions of indigenous people. Read more

RAAF Sergeant E.A. (Ted) Coates was flying his Wellington bomber over Germany on raid after raid, knowing that eventually he and his crew would find themselves on the receiving end of a German fighter. One night in November 1942 their worst fears were realised and Ted found himself parachuting through the darkness of a French night over enemy territory. This story relates his adventures as he walked and rode across France on his way to Spain and freedom ... without any help from the French Underground. Read more

'I think this book should be called The Monster of All Time. But I am a monster . . .' Patrick WhitePatrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair - lived an extraordinary life. David Marr's brilliant biography draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all: the man himself. In the weeks before his death, White read the final manuscript, which for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.Throughout his exciting narrative, Marr explores the roots of White's writing and unearths the raw material of his remarkable art. He makes plain the central fact of White's life as an artist: the homosexuality that formed his view of himself as an outcast and stranger able to penetrate the hearts of both men and women. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Patrick White is a biography of classic excellence - sympathetic, objective, penetrating and as blunt, when necessary, as White himself. Read more