AustLit

'Alec Chisholm inspired Australians to see nature anew. His Mateship with Birds, published in 1922, is a classic of nature writing, and until his death in 1977 he urged his compatriots to cherish the natural world as their national heritage. Chisholm was a pioneer conservationist, a leading ornithologist, and much else besides. He earned renown – and some controversy – as a journalist, biographer, historian and encyclopaedia editor. Idling in Green Places is the first full biography of this intriguing and influential Australian.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Tim Rowse has a rare talent for making us see things anew. He has done it in earlier books, but his latest takes that talent to new heights. It scrutinises the history of engagements between Indigenous and other Australians from federation through to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, with particular attentiveness to the recovery of the Indigenous peoples, demographically, culturally, politically and legally.'  (Introduction)

'During the interwar years, Australians grew increasingly anxious about their sparsely populated north. They had moral qualms about leaving land idle; they felt uneasy about international criticism of their lacklustre efforts in the tropics; they feared a stronger, more resolute nation might rob them of their under-utilised heritage. While anxieties intensified, there was an efflorescence of travel writing on northern Australia, as cars and aeroplanes made this part of the continent a little more accessible. Like other travel writers, those on northern Australia in the interwar years did not confine their narratives to what they did and what they saw. They commented on the burning questions of the day: on what the future of the north might hold and whether Australia’s northern lands could sustain a prolific white population. This article explores a range of representations of northern Australia in the travel literature published between the two world wars, with particular attention to the varied assessments of Australia’s tropical environments and the racial misgivings that disconcerted attempts to envisage an all-white north.'  (Publication abstract)

'Bridging historical scholarship and Aboriginal oral tradition, this innovative book tells the story of the Gugu Badhun people of the Valley of Lagoons in North Queensland. It provides new insights into Aboriginal–European interactions, and new understandings of how Aboriginal people sustained their identities and exercised agency.

'It lays bare violence and oppression, but also recognises the inter-racial cooperation and friendships which were equally part of Gugu Badhun experience. It tells of a people whose options were limited by state power and public racism but who remained proud and undaunted, making their own decisions for their collective and individual benefit.

'Much of the story is told in the words of Gugu Badhun people themselves. Interviews are interspersed with commentary and analysis by the four authors, one of whom, Yvonne Cadet-James, is herself a Gugu Badhun elder.

'This collaborative approach has produced a timely book for an Australia in which notions of Indigenous autonomy and self-determination are being re-imagined and re-configured.' (Publication summary)

'Fervent nationalists are always dissatisfied with their nation: its flesh-and-blood members fall far short of the nationalist ideal and have been gulled into fraudulent identities and fatuous lifestyles. Only by spiritual regeneration and by forging new myths of community and belonging can true nationhood be achieved. Germaine Greer’s Whitefella Jump Up: The shortest way to nationhood fits comfortably within these conventions of nationalist polemic.'  (Introduction)