Australian Aboriginal History

Dive deep into the mystical world of Aboriginal culture with Charles William Peck's landmark work, Australian Legends. As one of the earliest compilations, this book intricately narrates tales steeped in Dreamtime mythology, helping you explore the indigenous culture's understanding of the cosmos, morality, and the natural world. Peck's storytelling draws you into an ancestral past that resonates profoundly with modern listeners.

Here is a guide to the 60,000-year-old healing system of the Aborigines revealed through one man’s journey to overcome multiple sclerosis. In 1983, award-winning physicist Gary Holz was diagnosed with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis. By 1988, he was a quadriplegic. Then, in 1994, he followed a synchronistic suggestion and went to live with a remote Aboriginal tribe. Arriving in a wheelchair, alone, with almost no feeling left from the neck down, Holz embarked on a remarkable healing transformation of body, mind, and spirit and discovered his own gift for healing others.

According to the Australian government’s website, at the time of first contact with Europeans, there were some 500 distinct Indigenous nations, speaking different languages and following their own religious and cultural practices. As with all human societies, that of the Indigenous Australians is abounding in stories. Stories of how the world came to be the way it is, stories of heroism and perfidy, stories about animals and birds, and stories about love and hate all have parts to play in the wide array of myths, legends, and tales created by Indigenous Australians.

I tell you, you meet some strange characters in this game.... Boasting the biggest beats in the world - some as large as France - Australia's outback police have seen it all: natural disasters, incredible acts of selflessness, unspeakable crimes and daring rescues, just to name a few. And they've met some unforgettable characters along the way: from the murderer who stuffed his victims' bodies down wombat holes to the policeman who arrested his own wife....

“I love food” Nakkiah Lui says, and in the next breath whispers “so give us back our land”. In First Eat, a confrontational, raw and highly personal exploration of food politics, power and body sovereignty, Nakkiah Lui asks how our meals would look different if First Nations people owned the land from which the food came. First Eat is about more than just food, it’s an aural feast for a rich future.

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained almost entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. From there, however, the subjugation of Australia would take place rapidly. Within 20 years of the first British settlements being established, the British presence in Terra Australis was secure, and no other major power was likely to mount a challenge. In 1815, Napoleon would be defeated at Waterloo, and soon afterwards would be standing on the barren cliffs of Saint Helena.

Brilliantly reconstructed from contemporary narratives, The Last Outlaws is both a gripping work of historical true crime and a richly revealing examination of our nation at its birth. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith meets Killing for Country. In the winter of 1900, Wiradjuri man Jimmy Governor...

Miinaa was a young girl when the white ghosts first arrived. She remembers the day they raised a piece of cloth and renamed her homeland 'Bathurst'. Now she lives at Cloverdale and works for a white family who have settled there. The Nugents are kind, but Miinaa misses her miyagan. His brother, Windradyne, is a Wiradyuri leader, and visits when he can, bringing news of unrest across their ngurambang. Miinaa hopes the violence will not come to Cloverdale.

From one of Australia's leading Indigenous journalists comes a collection of fierce and powerful essays proving why the media need to believe Black witnesses and showcasing ways that journalism can be used to hold the powerful to account and make the world a more equitable place. Black Witness is the essential collection of First Nations journalism that we need right now – and always have.

One day while sitting around the dinner table with his family, Victor Briggs’s Uncle Tim told him that on a visit to Hawaii, he had met an Indigenous Hawaiian Elder who told him a story. A long time ago, Indigenous Australian seafarers had sailed to Hawaii on the trade winds. When they got there, they had helped the Hawaiians with skills, information and technology. Hawaiian people were so impressed with Aboriginal people that they let them stay on their islands when they were travelling throughout the Pacific Regions.

Bruce Pascoe has collected a swathe of literary awards for Dark Emu, and now he has brought together the research and compelling first-person accounts in a book for younger listeners. Using the accounts of early European explorers, colonists and farmers, Bruce Pascoe compellingly argues for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. He allows the listeners to see Australia as it was before Europeans arrived.

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. However, the first human footprints on this vast territory were felt 70,000 years earlier. The history of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia is a complex. For generations after the arrival of whites in Australia, the Aboriginal people were disregarded and marginalized, largely because they offered little in the way of a labor resource, and they occupied land required for European settlement.