AustLit

'I'm Aboriginal. I'm just not the Aboriginal person a lot of people want or expect me to be.

'What does it mean to be Aboriginal? Why is Australia so obsessed with notions of identity? Anita Heiss, successful author and passionate campaigner for Aboriginal literacy, was born a member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales, but was raised in the suburbs of Sydney and educated at the local Catholic school. She is Aboriginal - however, this does not mean she likes to go barefoot and, please, don't ask her to camp in the desert. After years of stereotyping Aboriginal Australians as either settlement dwellers or rioters in Redfern, the Australian media have discovered a new crime to charge them with: being too "fair-skinned" to be an Australian Aboriginal. Such accusations led to Anita's involvement in one of the most important and sensational Australian legal decisions of the 21st-century when she joined others in charging a newspaper columnist with breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. He was found guilty, and the repercussions continue.

'In this deeply personal memoir, told in her distinctive, wry style, Anita Heiss gives a first-hand account of her experiences as a woman with an Aboriginal mother and Austrian father, and explains the development of her activist consciousness.' (From the publisher's website.)

At the beginning of World War II, Lady Sarah Ashley travels from her home in England to Northern Australia to confront her husband, whom she believes is having an affair. He is in the country to oversee the selling of his enormous cattle station, Faraway Downs. Her husband sends Drover, an independent stockman, to transport her to Faraway Downs. When Lady Sarah arrives at the station, however, she finds that her husband has been murdered (allegedly by King George, an Aboriginal elder) and that cattle station manager Neil Fletcher is trying to gain control of Faraway Downs, so that Lesley 'King' Carney will have a complete cattle monopoly in the Northern Territory.

Lady Sarah is captivated by Nullah (King George's grandson) son of an Aboriginal mother and an unknown white father. When Nullah tells her that he has seen her cattle being driven onto Carney's land, Fletcher beats him. Lady Sarah fires Fletcher, deciding to try to run the cattle station herself. To save the property from Carney, she enlists the aid of Drover; together, they drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most unforgiving land. In the course of the journey, she falls in love with both Drover and the Australian landscape.

Lady Sarah, Nullah, and Drover live together happily at Faraway Downs for two years, while Fletcher (the actual murderer of Lady Sarah's husband and very likely the father of Nullah) kills Carney, marries his daughter, and takes over Carney's cattle empire. When the authorities send Nullah to live on Mission Island with the other half-Aboriginal children, Lady Sarah is devastated. In the meantime, she works as a radio operator in Darwin.

When the Japanese attack the island and Darwin in 1942, Lady Sarah fears that Nullah has been killed and Drover, who had quarrelled with Lady Sarah and left the station, believes Lady Sarah has been killed. Learning of Nullah's abduction to Mission Island, however, he sets out to rescue him. Lady Sarah decides to sell Faraway Downs to Fletcher and return to England. Drover and Nulla sail back into port at Darwin as Lady Sarah is about to depart, and the three are reunited. Fletcher, distraught at the death of his wife, attempts to shoot Nullah, but is speared by King George and dies.

'Jose Ramos Horta, twenty-five years old in 1975, and a member of the Fretilin Government, lures Darwin-based Australian journalist Roger East to East Timor to investigate the disappearance of the 'Balibo Five' - journalists Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart (Ch9) and from their rival network Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie (Ch7).

On the morning of October 16, all five men, though identifying themselves as journalists from Australia, are killed in cold blood by the invading Indonesian troops, and their bodies burnt. East does not accept the official story that soon emerges, that the men were killed in cross-fire. Horta and East travel from Dili to Balibo, now occupied during the daytime by Indonesian forces, to try and uncover the truth of the journalists' death.

Back in Dili, East decides to stay on while other journalists are evacuated, in the knowledge that Indonesian forces will soon land in the capital. The very next day Indonesian paratroopers and commandos land from the sea and immediately capture East who is reporting the invasion. Defiant to the end, East is executed the next day on the Dili wharf by an Indonesian execution squad.' Source: http://film.vic.gov.au (Sighted 12/08/2008).

'Bruce Beresford's a colourful film about an 'innocent abroad' as he blunders his way through the London of the 1970s was panned by the critics but a huge success with audiences. The film became the first Australian movie to make a million dollars, thereby playing a crucial part in the resurgence of the Australian film industry in the early 1970s by demonstrating the commercial viability of local production. It also did very well commercially in London, where it established a record for any Australian film released there.

'Based on Barry Humphries comic-strip character, which appeared in the British satirical magazine Private Eye in the 1960s, the screenplay was written by Humphries and Beresford, the story line deriving from the culture clash between the Australian innocent 'Bazza' McKenzie and the English - from a taxi driver who takes Barry from Heathrow to Earls Court by way of Stonehenge, to the decadent upper classes with their public school fetishes, the swinging scene of pop music promoters and Jesus freaks, and eventually the hallowed halls of BBC television. ' (Publication summary)

The Disappearing is an innovative new [free] app for iPhone, iPad and Android that (literally) explores poetry and place. Transform the world around you with new poems by some of Australia's finest poets, who've created a poetic map charting traces, fragmentary histories, impressions and memories.

Beginning with a collection of over 100 poems about Sydney, The Disappearing will stretch across Australia during 2012. Along with previously unpublished poetry, The Disappearing features exclusive videos of readings and interviews with poets. Users can upload their own poems to The Disappearing, preserving ideas, emotions and experiences about their own environment that vanish over time (publisher blurb http://redroomcompany.org/projects/disappearing/ sighted 5/9/2012).

'It is 1934, the Great War is long over and the next is yet to come. It is a brief time of optimism and advancement.

'Billowing dust and information, the government 'Better Farming Train' slides through the wheat fields and small towns of Australia, bringing city experts and advice to those already living on the land. The train is on a crusade to persuade the country that science holds the answers and that productivity is patriotic.

'Amongst the swaying cars full of cows, pigs and wheat, an unlikely seduction occurs between Robert Pettergree, a man with an unusual taste for soil, and Jean Finnegan, a talented young seamstress with a hunger for knowledge. In an atmosphere of heady scientific idealism they settle in the impoverished Mallee with the ambition of proving that science can transform the land.

'With failing crops and the threat of a new World War looming, Robert and Jean are forced to confront each other, the community they have destroyed, and the impact of progress on an ancient and fragile landscape.

'Erotically charged, and shot through with humour and a quiet wisdom, this haunting first novel evokes the Australian landscape in all its stark beauty and vividly captures the hope and disappointment of an era.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Nugi Garimara Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal family at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth...

The three girls - aged 8, 11 and 14 - managed to escape from the settlement's repressive conditions and brutal treatment. Barefoot without provisions or maps, they set out to find the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it passed near their home in the north. Tracked by native police and search planes, they hid in terror, surviving on bush tucker, desperate to return to the world they knew.

The journey to freedom - longer than many of the legendary walks of [the Australian nation's] explorer heroes... told from family recollections, letters between the authorities and the Aboriginal Protector, and ... newspaper reports of the runaway children.' Source: Publisher's blurb

The narrative begins in Western Australia in 1915 and follows the paths of Archie Hamilton and Frank Dunne, before and after their enlistment in the Australian Imperial Forces. Hamilton is the patriotic son of a grazier and Frank Dunne is a drifter with no great desire to fight for the British Empire. They meet as runners in an outback footrace and become best mates. After training in Egypt, they land at Gallipoli, just as the great Allied assaults of August 1915 are to begin.

Source: Australian Screen.

'Small towns harbour secrets. Rising, receding and returning like the tides lapping the fictional coastal town of Kinsale, the stories in this collection revolve around Alice and Grace, friends since childhood, who grow to live vastly different lives.

Weaving in and around these women is a lattice of interconnecting stories drawing in their husbands, families, neighbours and strangers, each linked to one another by fate or circumstance. Having Cried Wolf is a contemplative and affecting collection - one that marks the arrival of an original literary talent.' (From the publisher's website.)

'The fourth and final of the 2011 Boyer Lectures with prize-winning Australian journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks. In today's lecture we'll hear about the exact moment she thinks she became a novelist, and about the significance of literature in answering the large questions of who we are and how we should live.'

Source: ABC Radio National website, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/
Sighted: 12/12/2011

'Marie King is a 59-year-old divorcée from Sydney's affluent north shore. Having devoted her rather conventional life to looking after her husband and three children - who have now all departed the family home - she is experiencing something of an identity crisis, especially as she must now sell the family home and thus lose her beloved garden. On a folly she gets a tattoo.

'Marie forges a friendship with her tattoo artist, Rhys, who introduces her to an alternative side of Sydney. Through their burgeoning connection, Marie's two worlds collide causing great friction within Marie's family and with her circle of rich friends.' (From the publisher's website.)

'The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia have been telling stories since time immemorial. Although Indigenous oral cultures were once believed to be dying out, it is clear today, in Australia and elsewhere, that many aspects of these ancient cultures have survived in Indigenous communities, and are now thriving as a living, evolving part of contemporary life. Oral songs and narratives are traditionally an embodied and emplaced form of knowledge. Information is stored in people's minds in various narrative forms which, at the appropriate time, are transmitted from the mouths of the older generation to the ears of the young. Many narratives are connected to specific sites, and are transmitted in the course of people's movements through their country. Certain songs and stories are only transmitted in specific ceremonial contexts, while others circulate in the informal settings of everyday life. For oral traditions to survive, then, "the learning generation" must be in direct physical proximity to "the teaching generation". People must also have access to significant sites in their country, and be free to perform their ceremonies, speak their languages, and carry out their everyday cultural activities.' (Introduction)

Originally written in the 1920s by David Unaipon. The original work was edited by W. Ramsay Smith and published in 1930 credited to W. Ramsay Smith as Myths & Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, without acknowledgement of Unaipon's authorship. Shoemaker and Muecke republished it in 2001 under Unaipon's name and original title.

AustLit uses the original Unaipon title as the main title showing Ramsay Smith's title as an alternative title on those editions published prior to the restitution edition.

'An authoritative survey of Australian Aboriginal writing over two centuries, across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Including some of the most distinctive writing produced in Australia, it offers rich insights into Aboriginal culture and experience...

'The anthology includes journalism, petitions and political letters from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as major works that reflect the blossoming of Aboriginal poetry, prose and drama from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Literature has been used as a powerful political tool by Aboriginal people in a political system which renders them largely voiceless. These works chronicle the ongoing suffering of dispossession, but also the resilience of Aboriginal people across the country, and the hope and joy in their lives.' (Publisher's blurb)