AustLit

‘Fuck Australia, I hope it fucking burns to the ground.’ Sarah Maddison opens this book by quoting Tarneen Onus-Williams, the young Indigenous activist who sparked a brief controversy when her inflammatory comments about Australia were reported around 26 January 2018. For Maddison, a Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne, Onus-Williams’s Australia Day comments (and subsequent clarification) convey a profound insight into ‘the system’. She writes:

The current system – the settler colonial system – is not working ... Yet despite incontrovertible evidence of this failure, the nation persists in governing the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in ways that are damaging and harmful, firm in its belief that with the right policy approach … Indigenous lives will somehow improve. This is the colonial fantasy.' 

(Introduction)

'The story of the resilient people who make their home in Australia's far north, from the 'wild time' of the frontier days to the present.

''There is something about the Gulf Country that seems to become part of you.'

'With its great rivers, grassy plains and mangrove-fringed coastline, Queensland's remote Gulf Country is rich and fertile land. It has long been home to Aboriginal people and, since the 1860s, also to Europeans and to settlers with Chinese, Japanese and Afghan ancestry. 

'Richard J. Martin tells the story of a century-and-a-half of exploration and colonisation, the growth of cattle and mining industries, and the impact of Christian missionaries and Indigenous activism, through to the present day. He acknowledges the brutal realities of violence and dispossession, as well as the challenges of life on the land in northern Australia. 

'Drawing on extensive interviews with people across the Gulf Country, this is a lively and colourful account of tight-knit communities, relationships across cultures and resilience in the face of adversity.' (Publication summary)

'The year 2017 marked the twenty- fifth anniversary of the High Court’s 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (Mabo), which recognised the existence of Indigenous people’s traditional ‘native title’ rights over the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait. This finding, and the passage through parliament of the Keating government’s Native Title Act the following year, dramatically changed the legal position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australian society. Since then, there have been 338 determinations that native title exists in different parts of Australia, delivering significant benefits to a substantial proportion of claimant groups.' (Introduction)