Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

$21.99 AUD

Category: Indigenous Australians

Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the 'hunter-gatherer' tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Accomplished author Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that sugg ests that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required. ...Show more

Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Save Australia by Victor Steffensen

$28.50 AUD

Category: Indigenous Australians

Delving deep into the Australian landscape and its alarming state of devastation, Fire Country is a powerful account from Indigenous land management expert Victor Steffensen on how the revival of Indigenous fire practices, including what's called 'cool burns', could restore our country.   Fire Coun try offers practical solutions for better 'reading country' and knowing when is the right time to undertake cool burns, considering current climate conditions and each landscape's specific ecosystem. From the age of 18, Victor has spent time on country learning traditional cultural and ecological knowledge from Elders. Having been developed over many generations of his people living on the land, this knowledge shows clearly that Australia actually needs fire - with burning done in a controlled manner - for land care and healing.   Victor's writing is unassuming and honest, written in a manner that reflects the nature of yarning. And while much of the knowledge shared in his book is still unknown to western science, there is much evidence that, if adopted, it will benefit all Australians.   ...Show more

Radio Girl: The Story of the Extraordinary Mrs Mac, Pioneering Engineer and Wartime Legend by David Dufty

$28.50 AUD

Category: Australian History

All around Australia, former WRANs and navy men regard the woman they know as Mrs Mac with a level of reverence usually reserved for saints. Yet today no-one has any idea of who she was and how she rescued Australia's communication systems in World War II.

Lismore: From Lios Mor to Tuckurimba by Maurice Ryan

$15.00 AUD

Category: Australiana

This new history looks to incorporate insights from changes in the Lismore community, as well as presenting an overall history of Lismore.

Moonlite: The Tragic Love Story of Captain Moonlite and the Bloody End of the Bushrangers by Garry Linnell

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australiana

Charismatic, intelligent and handsome, George Scott is unlike any other bushranger. Born into a privileged life in famine-wracked Ireland, Scott's family loses its fortune and is forced to flee to New Zealand. There, Scott joins the local militia and fights as a soldier against the Maori in the brutal N ew Zealand wars. After recovering from a series of serious gunshot wounds, he sails to Australia and becomes a Lay Preacher, captivating churchgoers with his fiery and inspiring sermons. But Scott is also prone to bursts of madness. The local villagers back in Ireland often whispered that a 'wild drop' ran in the blood of the Scott family. One night he dons a mask in a small country town, arms himself with a gun and, dubbing himself Captain Moonlite, brazenly robs a bank before staging one of the country's most audacious jailbreaks. After falling in love with fellow prisoner James Nesbitt, a boyish petty criminal desperately searching for a father figure, Scott finds himself unable to shrug off his criminal past. Pursued and harassed by the police, he stages a dramatic siege and prepares for a final showdown with the law - and a macabre executioner without a nose. Meticulously researched and drawing on previously unpublished material, Moonlite is a brilliant work of non-fiction that reads like a novel. Told at a cracking pace, and based on many of the extensive letters Scott wrote from his death cell, Moonlite is set amid the violent and sexually-repressed era of Australia in the second half of the 19th century. With a cast of remarkable characters, it weaves together the extraordinary lives of our bushrangers and the desperation of a young nation eager to remove the stains of its convict past. But most of all, Moonlite is a tragic love story. For these are the dying days of the bushrangers and Captain Moonlite is about to make his last stand. ...Show more

Red Lead: The Legendary Australian Ship's Cat Who Survived the Sinking of HMAS Perth and the Thai-Burma Railway by Roland Perry

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australiana

The legendary Australian ship's cat who survived the sinking of HMAS Perth and the Thai-Burma Railway. Just after midnight on the 1st March 1942, Australia's most celebrated cruiser, HMAS Perth, was sunk by Japanese naval forces in the Sunda Strait off the coast of Java. Of the 681 men aboard, 328 survived the sinking and made it to shore - and one cat. Her name was Red Lead, and she was the ship's cat, beloved by the crew and by HMAS Perth's legendary captain Hec Waller. But surviving shell fire, torpedoes and the fierce currents of the Sunda Strait was only the start of the terrible trials Red Lead and the surviving crew were to face over the next three and a half years. From Java to Changi and then on the Thai-Burma Railway, Red Lead was to act as a companion, mascot and occasional hunter of food for a small group of sailors who made it their mission to keep her alive in some of the most hellish prison camps on earth.Red Lead's extraordinary story is one of courage, loyalty and love amidst battle, imprisonment and death, brought vividly to life by bestselling author Roland Perry.   ...Show more

The Jawsome Coast(s) Ed. 2

$35.00 AUD

Category: Australiana

Homeland Calling - Words from a New Generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voices by Desert Pea Media; Ellen van Neerven (Editor)

$23.99 AUD

Category: Indigenous Australians

With lyrics rich in rhyme, Homeland Calling is a hip-hop poetry collection that channels culture and challenges stereotypes. The words have all been written by First Nations youth from remote and regional communities around Australia, edited by award-winning author and poet Ellen van Neerven, and brough t to you by Desert Pea Media. These verses are the result of young artists exploring their place in the world and expressing the future they want to live in. Organised into four sections, 'Country is my heartbeat', 'History is in my bloodline', 'Flame in the struggle' and 'Pride in my people', the words of these deadly, young poets offer wider Australia a rare insight into their thoughts, hopes and dreams. At the back of the book, you'll find a notes section written by Ellen that addresses many of the basic misconceptions regarding First Nations histories and peoples. There's also a glossary of words used in the poems that demonstrate the diversity of languages spoken across this country. ...Show more

Lowitja: The Authorised Biography of Lowitja O'Donoghue by Stuart Rintoul; Lowitja O'Donoghue

$42.99 AUD

Category: Indigenous Australians

The profoundly moving biography of a truly great Australian who, against the greatest of odds, became one of Australia's most respected and recognisable Indigenous leaders. 'I am sometimes identified as one of the "success stories" of the policies of removal of Aboriginal children. But for much of my c hildhood I was deeply unhappy. I feel I had been deprived of love and the ability to love in return. Like Lily, my mother, I felt totally powerless. And I think this is where the seeds of my commitment to human rights and social justice were sown.' - Lowitja O'Donoghue Lowitja O'Donoghue is a truly great Australian. She is arguably our nation's most recognised Indigenous woman. A powerful and unrelenting advocate for her people, an inspiration for many, a former Australian of the Year, she sat opposite Prime Minister Paul Keating in the first negotiations between an Australian government and Aboriginal people and changed the course of the nation. But when Lowitja was born in 1932 to an Aboriginal mother and a white father in the harsh and uncompromising landscape of Central Australia the expectations for her life could not have been more different. At the age of two, she was handed over to the missionaries of the Colebrook Home for Half-Caste Children and cut off completely from her people and her culture. She would not see her mother again for another thirty years and would have no memory of her father. In 2001 a bitter controversy arose over whether Lowitja was 'stolen' as a child. In search of a past she did not remember, Lowitja went back to Central Australia accompanied by journalist Stuart Rintoul. This ground-breaking and long-awaited biography completes that journey into Lowitja's life and the challenging history of her times. It is a remarkable work about an extraordinary woman. 'A remarkable Australian leader. A leader whose unfailing instinct for enlargement marks her out as unique.' - Paul Keating 'If there is one woman that you would identify as being someone that inspires you, that terrifies you, that is a symbol of possibility, it would be Lowitja. The dignity, I think, is the thing that you remember the most.' - Linda Burney, first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the House of Representatives 'The greatest Aboriginal leader of the modern era . . . the rock who steadied us in the storm. Resolute, scolding, warm and generous, courageous, steely, gracious and fair. She held the hardest leadership brief in the nation and performed it bravely and with distinction.' - Noel Pearson 'She changed the course of Australian history. She literally seized the day.' - Robert Tickner, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs 1990-96 ...Show more

Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us by Paddy Manning

$31.50 AUD

Category: Australiana

'Our house is on fire,' 16-year-old Swedish school strike activist Greta Thunberg told world leaders in 2019. Across an angry year of weather, Australians watched it in real-time: record heatwaves and worsening drought, unprecedented fish kills in the Murray-Darling Basin and devastating wildfires acros s Queensland and NSW - this is climate change, a terrifying portent for the most arid continent on earth. But most shocking of all is the untold human toll - escalating human deaths in Australia and beyond. The climate crisis is now a health emergency, with extreme weather events, disease, mental illness and infrastructure collapse killing what the WHO predicts will be millions around the world over the next decade. Shocking and undeniable, Manning reveals what climate change really looks like, telling the moving stories of victims, their families and doctors - putting names and faces to the people who have already paid the ultimate price for inaction on the biggest moral challenge of our century. ...Show more

People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia by Grace Karskens

$37.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

A landmark history of Australia's first successful settler farming area, which was on the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. Award-winning historian Grace Karskens uncovers the everyday lives of ordinary people in the early colony, both Aboriginal and British.  

Southern Cross Crime by Craig Sisterson

$21.99 AUD

Category: Australian Writing & Language

Southern Cross Crime is the first comprehensive guide to modern Australian and New Zealand crime writing. From coastal cities to the Outback, leading critic Craig Sisterson showcases key titles from more than 200 storytellers, plus screen dramas ranging from Mystery Road to Top of the Lake. Fascinating insights are added through in-depth interviews with some of the prime suspects who paved the way or instigated the global boom, including Jane Harper, Michael Robotham, Paul Cleave, Emma Viskic, Paul Thomas, and Candice Fox. ...Show more