"This book traces the development of Darwin's social and physical history over the forty-two years of South Australia's administration of the region. Each chapter covers the term of office of the senior government offricer in Darwin, starting from Surveyor-General George Woodroffe Goyder, whose team of men surveyed the town site and the surrounding country in 1869, through all the Government Residents to Samuel James Mitchell who orchestrated the ceremony which marked the takeover of the Territory by the Commonwealth Government." --book cover.

Powerful and provocative, this is a beautifully written and very personal search to understand the men who were the protectors of Aboriginal people in Australia's north - their moral ambiguities, their good intentions and the devastating consequences of their decisions....

The greatest engineering problem facing Australia - the tyranny of distance - had a solution: the electric telegraph, and its champion was the sheep-farming colony of South Australia. In two years, Charles Heavitree Todd, leading hundreds of men, constructed a telegraph line across the centre of the continent from Port Augusta to Darwin. At nearly 3,000 kilometres long and using 36,000 poles at '20 to the mile', it was a mammoth undertaking but in October 1872, Adelaide was finally linked to London. The Overland Telegraph Line crossed Aboriginal lands first seen by John McDouall Stuart just 10 years before. Messages which previously took weeks to cross the country now took hours. Passing through eleven new repeater stations and the remotest parts of Australia, the line joined the vast global telegraph network, and a new era was ushered in. Each station held a staff of six. They became centres of white civilization and the cattle or sheep industry and, in many places, the Aborigines were displaced. The unique stories of how men and women lived and/or died on the line range from heroic through desperate to tragic, but they remain an indelible part of Australia's history. '...a book written with heart and determination ... a lasting tribute to the inventiveness and tenacity of the people behind the planning, building and execution of the Overland Telegraph - a true nation building endeavour.' - His Excellency, The Honourable Hieu Van Le, AC.

The frontiersmen who came to the Victoria River District of Australia’s Northern Territory included cattle and horse thieves, outlaws, capitalists, dreamers, drunks, madmen and others, from the explorers of the 1830s and 1850s to the founders of the big stations in the 1880s and 1890s, and the cattle duffers in the early 1900s. This book looks at them all. Drawing on painstaking research into obscure and rich documentary sources, Aboriginal oral traditions, and first-hand investigations conducted in the region over thirty-five years, Darrell Lewis pieces together the complex interactions between the environment, the powerful and warlike Aboriginal tribes and the settlers and their cattle, which produced what truly became A Wild History.

There has been a recent expansion of interest in cultural approaches to rural communities and to the economic and social situation of rurality more broadly. This interest has been particularly prominent in Australia in recent years, spurring the emergence of an interdisciplinary field called 'rural cultural studies'. This collection is framed by a large interdisciplinary research project that is part of that emergence, particularly focused on what the idea of 'cultural sustainability' might mean for understanding experiences of growth, decline, change and heritage in small Australian country towns. However, it extends beyond the initial parameters of that research, bringing together a range of senior and emerging Australian researchers who offer diverse approaches to rural culture. The essays collected here explore the diverse forms that rural cultural studies might take and how these intersect with other disciplinary approaches, offering a uniquely diverse but also careful account of life in country Australia. Yet, in its emphasis on the simultaneous specificity and cross-cultural recognisability of rural communities, this book also outlines a field of inquiry and a set of critical strategies that are more broadly applicable to thinking about the "rural" in the early twenty-first century. This book will be valuable reading for students and academics of Geography, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, introducing rural cultural studies as a new dynamic and integrative discipline.

From natural phenomenon such as Cyclone Tracy, and the Ash Wednesday and Black Friday fires, to key moments in our military history such as Flanders in 1917, and the fall of Singapore, this is an essential guide to understanding the people, the ideas and the events that defined the course of Australia's history.

This book examines the diversity of practice in regional research and its contribution to local, national and global issues. Three themes are advanced here: Place and change, Transition and resilience, and Challenges for the future. Contributors embrace frameworks of co-design and transdisciplinary practice to build communities of practice in response to lived experience in regional contexts. Their work highlights the strategic importance of a regional focus at a time when global connectivity and mobility is increasing and the complexity of ‘wicked’ problems demands more than one approach or solution. Such complex problems require nuanced, and at times ‘bespoke’ methodological approaches to better understand and support not just regional adaptation, resilience and transformation, but to manage all these things at a time when change is everywhere.