AustLit

'While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been largely ignored or marginalised in national histories of war and service, they have remembered their involvement in Defence service and the service of their relatives.

'Our Mob Served presents a moving and little-known history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander war time and defence service, told through the vivid oral histories and treasured family images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 

'This unique book shares lively and compelling stories of war, defence service and the impact on individuals, families and communities, sometimes for the first time.' (Publication summary)

'For countless generations, coastal country in the west Kimberley region of northwest Australia has been the home of Dambeemangaddee Traditional Owners. Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee- We're Telling All of You describes the deep history of this country. In it our senior people describe our country's creation during Lalai and provide recollections of our ancestors' lives.

'The book also draws on archival sources and information Dambeemangaddee people had shared with early missionaries and anthropologists, while incorporating cultural knowledge our senior people have imparted over the past four decades to the book's compilers and authors.

'The result is a book that contains an unprecedented level of detail regarding our history, culture and country- the Aboriginal names of some three hundred ancestors, many born in the mid-1800s; their connections to country and to each other; their responses to the arrival of explorers, missionaries and others in our country; and their often heroic efforts to sustain our traditions and care for our country despite outsiders' attempts to regulate their lives and displace them from our lands.' (Publication summary)

'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)

'When Europeans first arrived in the Kimberley, a turbulent era began for the Indigenous people. To survive, they aligned themselves with white men through unspoken and unequal contracts of ownership and protection.'

'Aboriginal men were forced to fight for their own women, children and resources, and many were driven away from pastoral stations or gaoled. Until 1968, when equal wages were finally granted, black pastoral workers received only a pocket money allowance and rations. By then the stations no longer sustained them, and Aboriginal people gradually moved towards towns and reserves, where Welfare and Social Security became their only means of survival.'

'In this absorbing study, survivors of this devastating time speak openly to Mary Anne Jebb about first contact between blacks and whites, the arrival of Welfare, and the demise of pastoralism in the northern ranges. Alongside their oral testimonies, the author draws on a range of written archives to explore what really happened during the settlement of the Kimberley.' (Source: Publisher's website)