Blackfella's Point lies on the Towamba River in south-eastern New South Wales. This work is a history for every Australian who is interested in the story of settler-Australia's relations with indigenous people, what happened between them, and how they came to confront the truth about their past.

This anthology brings together leading Australian and North American nature writers. Responding to places that sustain, inspire and sometimes sadden, the pieces are propelled by passion, anger and history.

Oral history is inherently about memory, and when oral history interviews are used "in public," they invariably both reflect and shape public memories of the past. Oral History and Public Memories is the only book that explores this relationship, in fourteen case studies of oral history's use in a variety of venues and media around the world. Readers will learn, for example, of oral history based efforts to reclaim community memory in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa; of the role of personal testimony in changing public understanding of Japanese American history in the American West; of oral history's value in mapping heritage sites important to Australia's Aboriginal population; and of the way an oral history project with homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio became a tool for popular education. Taken together, these original essays link the well established practice of oral history to the burgeoning field of memory studies.

With jumping crocs in Kakadu, elemental Uluru and Sydney's world-famous surf beaches, Australia is packed full of unforgettable adventures, and The Rough Guide to Australia will ensure you don't miss a thing. Now in its twelfth edition, The Rough Guide to Australia has been fully updated with more insider tips from Rough Guide's expert authors. Detailed full-colour maps help you negotiate the wilds of the Outback or simply find the best place for a flat white. Hand-picked itineraries and inspiring photography make planning a breeze, whether you want to swim with turtles around the Great Barrier Reef or cruise the surf-battered Great Ocean Road. Get to know the best budget-friendly bistros in Melbourne, discover Perth's craft beer scene or join a vineyard tour in the Barossa Valley with our comprehensive reviews. Adding depth to your travels, our Contexts section sheds light on Aboriginal culture, indigenous wildlife and over 40,000 years of Australian history. An indispensable travel companion, The Rough Guide to Australia will help you make the most of your trip of a lifetime.

This lecture describes South Africa's current attempts to accommodate traditional leadership within the new constitution and system of government.

Sounding 1: BEFORE 1840 The notes, journals and characters of Aboriginal Protectors William Thomas and his Chief George Robinson form the backbone of this compilation. With this ethnographic material we learn something of the Kulin worldview into this mostly white-fella history. Sounding 1: Before 1840 describes the initial British and European experiences, events, observations, intentions, self-serving judgements, ignorance, naivete, treachery and so on when they found Oz and proclaimed the continent theirs by the now obvious fiction of terra nullius – Latin legalese for ‘land belonging to no people’. The reader may enjoy separating the grains of truth from the chaff propaganda of Empire capitalism or racist / sectarian Christian bible dogma that was the self-serving mindset of the white land-takers. Batman and Fawkner’s land-hunting deals with local koori’s along with the re-emergence of the remarkable wild white castaway Buckley made their mark on the first settlement at Melbourne. The focus widens in 1836 with Surveyor-General Major Mitchell’s and his Wuradjuri guides ‘conquering the interior’ from the Murray near Mildura to the Western District at Portland and then back north-east across the state to the Murray upstream at Albury. His wheel tracks opened up Victoria from the north. First contact race interactions at Port Phillip and the notion of cultural-coexistence during the first five years leads to the role of ‘successful battler’ and publican Fawkner in the colonial invasion process from Kulin country to sheep-run to city. Sounding 1 then winds up with Melbourne’s first executions and descriptions of Port Phillip as the money melting pot forming the Melbourne hub of world capitalism. Twentieth century academic studies now identify native religion, language zones, tribal locations and clan heads at the time of dispossession by pirate capitalism. In describing the Australian land-rush the chapter echoes oscillate between history, sociology, race theory, trade and class wars, whaling and sealing, imperialism and the monopoly East India Company army mates all pitted against the ‘vanishing race’ of hunter-gathering ‘savages’. The dispossession was virtually complete in Victoria before the 1850’s gold rushes transformed the sheep-runs into banker’s dividend wealth for the ‘winners’. Sounding 2: DISPOSSESSION AT MELBOURNE: Sounding 2 unfolds gently with a wistful early Melbourne memoir involving Batman’s lost lawyer Gellibrand in 1836 but then we confront the frontier ‘kill or be killed’ point of necessity. The violent life, times and fate of mass murderer Fred Taylor who was first employed as overseer for banker Swanston’s Bellarine peninsula land-grab sets the local dispossession tone. Taylor’s repeated atrocities today exposes a credibility gap in Oz – between civilized progress and slaughter, that now looms over all else in Victoria’s birth as an independent state in 1851. The winter of 1837 saw the first violent death of a white squatter and his servant by ‘savage natives’ north-west of Williamstown at Mt Cotterell. Town leaders such as Fawkner and ‘police chief’ Henry Batman formed a posse that also included clan heads from both the Melbourne and Geelong tribal areas. Buckley refused to take part in the vigilante party and its punitive actions belied the humanitarian standards expressed in Batman’s treaty deed. This revenge slaughter and destruction of ‘villages’ by the white invaders forced the Sydney government to investigate and so began administering ‘law and order’ at Port Phillip. By 1838 Sydney trumped Batman’s land-grab and the penal government of NSW on the one hand executing eight ‘whites’ for killing what the newspapers called ‘savages’, while on the other hand providing sufficient speedy cavalry to tackle black resistance in Victoria at places such as west of Colac and near Benalla after the Faithfull massacre. The arrival in 1839 of first governor La Trobe and the Aboriginal Protectorate plan then unfolds the development of town civic structures while tribal life disintegrates. Government and private measures to ‘tame the naked Melbourne natives’ culminated with the dawn Merri Creek round-up in October 1840 of hundreds of Kulins by Major Lettsom’s redcoats and townsmen. This appears as the death blow to tribal life, and with the first shiploads of migrating British colonists arriving in 1841, near genocide for the Kulin, Mara, Kurnai and Murray River first-peoples.

On Track tells the story of John Blay’s long-distance search for the Bundian Way, an important Aboriginal pathway between Mt Kosciuszko and Twofold Bay near Eden on the New South Wales far south coast. The 360-kilometre route traverses some of the nation’s most remarkable landscapes, from the highest place on the continent to the ocean. This epic bushwalking story uncovers the history, country and rediscovery of this significant track. Now heritage-listed, and thanks to the work of Blay and local Indigenous communities, the Bundian Way is set to be one of the great Australian walks.

In recent years Anzac an idea as much as an actual army corps has become the dominant force within Australian history, overshadowing everything else. The commemoration of Anzac Day is bigger than ever, while Remembrance Day, VE Day, VP Day and other military anniversaries grow in significance each year.

Why do Aboriginal women in Australia experience such high levels of violence in their own communities? In this considered and carefully researched book, Joan Kimm discusses the extent and nature of the violence, its underlying causes, current policies that deal with it, and changes that might improve these policies. Her work covers: the devastating legacy of European colonialism on Indigenous culture, modern anthropological evidence about patriarchy and violence in traditional Aboriginal societies, beliefs held by Aboriginals, particularly men, about their cultural heritage, the impact of cultural heritage upon modern Indigenous society, and changing judicial attitudes to sentencing Aboriginal men for violence to Aboriginal women, shifting from emphasis on the men's cultural background to emphasis on the women's rights as victims. Kimm shows how this multi-faceted environment, particularly the interaction of two patriarchal laws, has had, and continues to have, very real destructive effects on Aboriginal women. Kimm argues powerfully that Aboriginal women, like all women, like all humans, have the universal right to lives free of violence. She contends that current law, policy and practice place too much emphasis on their rights as Indigenous people and too little on their rights as women. A shift in emphasis will be an important first step to safer lives.