AustLit

'Mickey Dewar made a profound contribution to the history of the Northern Territory, which she performed across many genres. She produced high‑quality, memorable and multi-sensory histories, including the Cyclone Tracy exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and the reinterpretation of Fannie Bay Gaol. Informed by a great love of books, her passion for history was infectious. As well as offering three original chapters that appraise her work, this edited volume republishes her first book, In Search of the Never-Never. In Dewar’s comprehensive and incisive appraisal of the literature of the Northern Territory, she provides brilliant, often amusing insights into the ever-changing representations of a region that has featured so large in the Australian popular imagination.'  (Publication summary)

'Dr Michelle ('Mickey') Sue Dewar was an outstanding historian of the Northern Territory (NT) and a champion of history across many genres. Her contribution to the study of the north was rigorous, broad-ranging and prolific. Her body of work is often iconoclastic, but always entertaining and meticulously researched. ' (Introduction)
 

'Xavier Herbert is one of Australia’s outstanding novelists and one of the more controversial. In his time, he was also an outspoken public figure. Yet many young Australians today have not heard of the man or his novels. His key works Capricornia(1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) won major awards and were judged as highly significant on publication, yet there has been relatively little analysis of their impact. Although providing much material for Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster film Australia (2008), his works are rarely recommended as texts in school curricula or in universities. Gough Whitlam took a particular interest in the final draft of Poor Fellow My Country, describing it as a work of ‘national significance’ and ensuring the manuscript was sponsored to final publication. In 1976 Randolph Stow described it as ‘THE Australian classic’. Yet, a search of the Australian Literature database will show that it is one of the most under-read and least taught works in the Australian literary canon. In our view, an examination of his legacy is long overdue. This collection brings together new scholarship that explores the possible reasons for Herbert’s eclipse within public recognition, from his exposure of unpalatable truths such as interracial intimacy, to his relationship with fame. This reevaluation gives new readings of the works of this important if not troublesome public intellectual and author.' (Publication abstract)

'The vast shape-shifting continent of Australia enables us to take a long view of history. We consider ways to cross the great divide between the deep past and the present. Australia’s human past is not a short past, so we need to enlarge the scale and scope of history beyond 1788. In ways not so distant, these deeper times happened in the same places where we walk today. Yet, they were not the same places, having different surfaces, ecologies and peoples. Contributors to this volume show how the earth and its past peoples can wake us up to a sense of place as history – as a site of both change and continuity.

'This book ignites the possibilities of what the spaces and expanses of history might be. Its authors reflect upon the need for appropriate, feasible timescales for history, pointing out some of the obstacles encountered in earlier efforts to slice human time into thematic categories. Time and history are considered from the perspective of physics, archaeology, literature, western and Indigenous philosophy. Ultimately, this collection argues for imaginative new approaches to collaborative histories of deep time that are better suited to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Contributors to this volume, including many leading figures in their respective disciplines, consider history’s temporality, and ask how history might expand to accommodate a chronology of deep time. Long histories that incorporate humanities, science and Indigenous knowledge may produce deeper meanings of the worlds in which we live.' (Publication summary)

'Lake Mungo is an ancient Pleistocene lake-bed in south-western New South Wales, and is one of the world’s richest archaeological sites. Message from Mungo focuses on the interface over the last 40 years between the scientists on one hand, and, on the other, the Indigenous communities who identify with the land and with the human remains revealed at the site. This interface has often been deeply troubled and contentious, but within the conflict and its gradual resolution lies a moving story of the progressive empowerment of the traditional custodians of the area.' (Source: Publishers website)

'A few years ago, I wrote a letter to Greg Dening. I was staying at my childhood home in Brisbane, where my parents still live. It was the school vacation, and my daughters were being minded upstairs by their grandparents. I sat in the office under the house, a 1950s-style elevated Queensland house, not the romantic now sought-after variety with deep wooden verandahs, but one with a concrete patio and swirly wrought iron railing up a tiled staircase. Under the house was not a place for us children, at least on weekdays. This was the office and base of the family plumbing business—one side housed a row of plumbing vans which seeped black liquid onto the concrete ground, while above hung the ingeniously arranged, ever changing complex of copper and plastic pipes. Like branches of a familiar canopy, these softly gleaming creatures went unnoticed by me, though it was hard to ignore the racket of their clanging early-morning departures from beneath my bedroom floorboards. Under the house, the brick wall on the far side was lined with cardboard box after box of plumbing taps, washers, sockets, tools, hot-water systems, drain-digging devices, and the ‘Insinkerator’ cutting tool Dad had invented himself: anonymous brown boxes, except for the scrawled, indecipherable abbreviations and bad spelling. The place I wrote that letter was in the office, with its sour, peppery smells of metals, burning solder, grease, raw bricks and mortar, and its distracting poster of ‘unionist’ monkeys dressed as plumbers. This narrow, cave-like room was now devoted to charity work, especially speeches for the Lions Club.' (Introduction)

'For anyone wanting to write histories that capture the imagination and challenge the intellect. A useful text for teachers and students in history-writing classes.' (Publication summary)

'The Aboriginal stockman in cowboy hat, brightly coloured shirt, jeans and riding boots, is a familiar sight in much of outback Australia. Yet, white Australia has largely excluded Aborigines - men and women - from its national legends.

'Born in the Cattle tells the story of Aboriginal involvement in the northern cattle industry. It shows how the Aboriginal people excelled at this 'no shame job', how they incorporated it into their world, how they used it to stay on their own land with their kin. Combining new skills with old, they shaped a unique Aboriginal cattle country - and thereby made a major contribution to the economy of Australia's north.

'Using oral evidence which enables Aboriginal perspectives to emerge in a way not previously possible, Born in the Cattle is a major work of social history, the first to describe the texture of everyday life and work in the outback north before World War II. The story begins with the battle for the waterholes, describes the skills the Aboriginal people brought to work with cattle, reveals for the first time the important role of Aboriginal women, and explores in a new way the complex pattern of relationships between white and black in the outback.

'To protect their country and its people, Aborigines had to teach station whites many things. Aborigines worked the stations; they managed the land in new ways, though following old principles. They have made the cattle industry their own; they are still the majority of those living on northern pastoral stations, and their dynamic culture leaves a distinctive mark on bush life...'' (Publication summary)

The story of Amy Laurie, her life and work in cattle stations around the Kimberley area.