AustLit

'Coniston, written for a popular audience, is a compelling read. The prologue portrays Central Australia during the 1920s as an alien environment for settlers, who were at the mercy of marauding Aborigines. The racial violence, exacerbated by drought, is said to have exploded with the so-called ‘Warramulla invasion’ that saw Aboriginal people kill Fred Brooks on Coniston Station, then attack other white men camped along the Lander River. Subsequently, Mounted Constable George Murray was appointed to investigate these attacks, which led to a series of expeditions that resulted in the killing of numbers of Aboriginal people. These events are now referred to as ‘the Coniston massacre’. An official inquiry into the slayings resulted in the finding that Murray and his men shot thirty-one Aboriginal people in self-defence. Noting that the war of the Warramullas was ‘a figment of a fevered white imagination’ (4), the author, Michael Bradley, is interested in getting to the truth of the situation: ‘why it happened’ and ‘how many died’. He asks, furthermore, why Coniston ‘is not part of the conversation’ about ‘Australia's graphic history of war and large-scale death’ (5).' (Introduction)

'Place-based cultural knowledge – of ceremonies, songs, stories, language, kinship and ecology – binds Australian Indigenous societies together. Over the last 100 years or so, records of this knowledge in many different formats – audiocassettes, photographs, films, written texts, maps, and digital recordings – have been accumulating at an ever-increasing rate. Yet this extensive documentary heritage is dispersed. In many cases, the Indigenous people who participated in the creation of the records, or their descendants, have little idea of where to find the records or how to access them. Some records are held precariously in ad hoc collections, and their caretakers may be perplexed as to how to ensure that they are looked after.

'Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond explores the strategies and practices by which cultural heritage materials can be returned to their communities of origin, and the issues this process raises for communities, as well as for museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Green's book provides a fascinating and fine-grained analysis of a traditional narrative practice among Arrernte women that entails the telling of ‘sand stories’. Green's principle concern is how the technique of sand drawing is used in conjunction with speech, gesture, hand signs and song to communicate meaning. The complexity of sand story narration is such that it is difficult to separate these different semiotic modalities from each other. Indeed, ‘in isolation, each of these modalities does not carry the entire message’ (2014: 90). Accordingly, Green focuses on sand drawing as part of an ‘ensemble’ of expressive forms. Her approach is informed by new developments in linguistics and anthropology which view language as more than just speech and emphasise its embodied nature.' (Introduction)

'Aboriginal women tell the stories of their lives and history on the Lander River in Central Australia. They speak of growing up in the days before Europeans arrived in their country; of learning about social relationships and religious ceremony; of hunting and gathering with the older women. Then come stories about their early encounters with Europeans and the changes that followed.'

Source: Warlpiri Women's Voices, back cover.