History & Archaeology Books

Country women and the colour bar is a timely corrective to established ideas about race relations in rural New South Wales by revealing the untold story of grassroots efforts by Aboriginal and white women, working together.In the 1950s and 1960s, in...

Bone and tooth tools and ornaments have been made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for at least 46,000 years some of the oldest organic technologies in the world. Despite their beauty, sophistication, and ubiquity, archaeologists and...

Brian Butler's grandmother was taken from her family in 1910. She was 12 years old. Twenty years later her daughter, Brian's mother, was taken.Thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, like Brian Butler's, have been coping with the...

By the late 1960s, Indigenous education in Australia was in crisis. When Whitlam swept to power in 1972, his Labor government reached out to Indigenous people to guide change at a national level. The National Aboriginal Education Committee was the result...

On 23 August 1966, approximately 200 Gurindji stockmen and their families walked off Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory, protesting against poor working conditions and the taking of their land by pastoralists. Led by Vincent...

Within its busy urban presence, Melbourne has a rich and complex Aboriginal heritage. Amongst the city landscape lie layers of a turbulent history and an ongoing vibrant culture. But you need to know where to look. Melbourne...

An updated edition of an epic and remarkable story. In this powerful memoir, Peter Coppin's story emerges; told in fragments, moments of time and memories.A senior Nyamal lawman, Coppin was born in Yarrie country in Western...

The battle for Coranderrk was one of the first sustained campaignsfor justice, land rights and self-determination. Proud of their culture, theircommunity and their award-winning farm, the Kulin people (led by William Barak)lobbied against the Aboriginal...

Our stories are our survival centres on the continuity of Wiradjuri culture. It is a celebration of storytelling and the joys of life within an Aboriginal Australian community. Our stories offers an alternative to the commonly told stories of Aboriginal...

We come from the desert is the story of Minyjun (Monty Hale), a senior Ngulipartu man from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Written in his own language and in English, Minyjun shares with us his extraordinary life, from his family's migration...

Matutjara woman, Jessie Lennon, was born on a sheep station near Kingoonya in the 1920s. Aged six, she accompanied her father on a ceremonial journey with the Old People, as far west as Ooldea, in the time of Daisy Bates, and north to Coober Pedy, then a...

Despite its bustling urban presence, Sydney has a rich and complex Aboriginal heritage. Hidden within its burgeoning city landscape, lie layers of a vibrant culture and a turbulent history. But, you need to know where to look. Aboriginal...

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Indigenous responses to colonisation. It deals with Torres Strait Islanders' 160-year continuing struggle against outsider intervention. The author focuses on the Torres Strait Islander peoples'...

Ali Drummond has had an extraordinary life, by any standards. Orphaned when young, Ali took to a life at sea aged just fourteen. Originally taken on as an apprentice, Ali applied himself to learning the skills he needed to survive and prosper in a...

On 27 May 1967 an overwhelming majority of electors voted in a national referendum to amend clauses of the Australian Constitution concerning Aboriginal people. 27 May 2007 is the 40th anniversary of this landmark event. The referendum is commonly...

A Record in Stone is a comprehensive investigation into the different ways in which archaeologists use flaked stone artefacts as a basis for reconstructing the distant human past. The authors not only describe the range of flaked stone artefact forms...

In 1964, a group of 20 Aboriginal women and children in the Western Desert made their first contact with European Australians - patrol officers from theWoomera Rocket Range, clearing an area into which rockets were to be fired. They had been pursued by...

What is the place of Australia's colonial memorials in today's society? Do we remove, destroy or amend? Monumental Disruptions investigates how these memorials have been viewed, and are viewed, by First Nations people to find a way forward.In June 2020,...

'Insightful, sensitively written and compelling.' Libby Lester, Head of Journalism, Media and Communications, University of Tasmania'An unflinching dissection of the relationships between journalists and their subjects a compelling expos of journalistic...

** Shortlisted for WA Premier's Prize for Book of the Year 2023 **'... you need an organisation like the KLC to be your shield and spear, to be able to cut through the bureaucracy to make change. To be able to protect things that are important to...

'For various reasons, this story cannot be proven. But that does not matter to me because in my Aboriginal way of being and knowing, stories like my uncle's do not need modern scientific proof to have validity - the role of story in Indigenous...

In this montage of memoir, art, silk paintings, and photographs, Sally Bin Demin remembers her childhood growing up in Broome during the 1940s and 50s. As one of the 'after the war kids', Sally's lifestyle was embedded in the many cultural traditions of...

David Walker is a distinguished Australian social historian whose eyesight deteriorated suddenly at the end of 2004 as a result of macular degeneration. His blindness caused him to reconsider his own relation to the past, and the history of his family,...

Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia's most polluted urban waterway, the 'Cooks River', to a...

Why is dress so much more than draping ourselves with the nearest piece of material we can find? And why does being dressed change us into creatures that seem so separate from the rest of nature? Being Prepared explores several ways these transformations...

Popular culture has mythologised the Dunera Boys but who were the real men who sailed on the infamous ship, and how did the voyage transform their lives?Art historian Tonia Eckfeld draws on a deeply personal history to tell the story of her father and...

*Victorian Community History Awards : History Publication Commendation*Save Our Sons tells for the first time the full story of the Save Our Sons movement of Australian women who banded together to oppose conscription during the Vietnam War.In 1965,...

The story of the 'Dunera Boys' is an intrinsic part of the historyof Australia in the Second World War and in its aftermath. The injustice these2000 men suffered through British internment in camps at Hay, Tatura and Orangeis well known. Less familiar is...

Asbestos in Australia presents for the first time a multi-dimensional view ofAustralia's asbestos story featuring contributions from experts in thedisciplines of history, journalism, medicine, law and public health. It alsoincludes first-hand accounts of...

'My journey to this book is the culmination of a long-held fascination with the history and currency of Australia's domestic interior. Having been born in a remote, desert-bound Queensland town, I have felt its power as a solace; a retreat from the...

In this collection Freda Hodge retrieves early voices of Holocaust survivors. Men, women and children relate experiences of deportation and ghettoisation, forced labour camps and death camps, death marches and liberation. Such eye-witness accounts...

Geoffrey Bolton was the most versatile and widely travelled of his generation of Australian historians. As a scholar, teacher and commentator he enriched understanding of the country's regional mosaic, some of its notable figures and others who were just...

'When scholars of such rigorous and refined erudition engage with a topic of such critical importance it is a cause for celebration, as are the lives themselves, painstakingly recorded so movingly herein. And all of it comes into the world not a moment...

This is the rollicking tale of Australia's first true adventure playground, when children were allowed to use a patch of public land as their own backyard, to play in freely as they wished, not as adults directed them. They chased their dreams and...

**2021 National Biography Award, highly commended****2020 NSW Premier's History Awards, shortlisted**A new edition of this acclaimed biography of an unsung literary talent.Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with...

A new format of an acclaimed history - joint winner of the Northern Territory Chief Minister's History Book Award 2013.In 1883, pastoralists began to drive great herds of cattle into the Northern Territory's Victoria River District. They entered a vast...

When Jewish survivors of the Holocaust arrived in Australia after World War II, they were filled with hope that they could build a new life. These survivors found themselves in a country not only blessedly far from the chaos of post-war Europe but also...

My father, political activist Samuel Mark Goldbloom, was my hero and my nemesis all the days of his life.Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo grew up in thrall to her father, a prominent socialist and covert member of the Communist Party. From an early age, she...

In 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia's Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red...

Tarenootairer (c.180658) was still a child when a band of white sealers bound her and forced her onto a boat. From there unfolded a life of immense cruelty inflicted by her colonial captors. As with so many Indigenous women of her time, even today the...

How much do you know about the history of Australia's oldest political party, the Australian Labor Party? You know the big names: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. But what about the names behind the big names? The unsung and overlooked True...

As the many nations of the Pacific deal with the threat of climate change, including rising sea levels and lessening access to fresh water, they are also suffering from some of the slowest rates of development of any region on earth. Now more than ever,...

Fatal Contact explores the devastating infectious diseases introduced into the Indigenous populations of Australia after the arrival of the British colonists in 1788. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and sexually transmitted...

*Victorian Community History Awards : History Publication Commendation*At the height of the Victorian gold rush, between July 1852 and June 1853, hundreds of government-assisted migrants from Lancashire, England, made their way to Australia and...

The Ypres salient 'was the favourite battle ground of the devil and his minions' wrote one returned serviceman after the First World War. Few who fought in the infamous third battle of Ypres now known as Passchendaele in 1917 would have...

The Emperor's Grace is the story of the men of "C" Force the first contingent of Australian, British and Dutch POWs shipped from Singapore to Japan in November 1942 who worked in the Kawasaki Shipyard in Kobe before the...

Australian life has never had a chronicler quite like the Vagabond. Renowned as journalist and 'eminently unconventional character', he suffered extremes of poverty and prosperity. These enabled him to record first-hand...