Danny Dawson lives on a cattle station in the Australian outback. Usually the annual cattle muster excites Danny, but everything is different now. Because Danny's beloved older brother died in an accident last year, and nobody will talk about it. Because his teenage sister is pregnant and won't tell anyone who the father is. Because his mother can't cope with any of it and has hired a wide-eyed English house girl to deal with the family. Timber Creek Station is the story of a grieving family, entrenched racism, and the surprising ways one boy—who thought he'd be stuck in one terrible place forever—can take a leap forward.

Danny Dawson lives in the middle of the Australian outback. His older brother Jonny was killed in an accident last year but no-one ever talks about it. And now it's time for the annual muster. The biggest event of the year on the cattle station, and a time to sort the men from the boys. But this year things will be different: because Jonny's gone and Danny's determined to prove he can fill his brother's shoes; because their fourteen-year-old sister is pregnant; because it's getting hotter and hotter and the rains won't come; because cracks are beginning to show . . . When Danny's mum admits she can't cope, the family hires a housegirl to help out - a wide-eyed English backpacker. She doesn't have a clue what she's let herself in for. And neither do they.

In this fascinating and beautifully written book, Heather McDonald examines Aboriginal people's experiences of colonialism and post-colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Blood, Bones and Spirit analyses how Aboriginal people have appropriated Biblical stories of land inheritance, expansion and loss in order to make sense of their own dispossession. It investigates the embodiment of Christianity by Aboriginal people through their appropriation of Christ's body-his blood, bones and spirit-in order to replenish and heal their own colonised bodies. Indeed, this local study of Christianisation in a small East Kimberley town presents a challenge to the very history and philosophy of Western religion. Heather McDonald spreads out before the reader various aspects of Aboriginal Christianity: the way Aborigines have assimilated Christian stories to make sense of their history and their relationships with the dominant society; their understanding of what it means to be Christian; their church activities; and their conflicting interpretations of the Christian way of life. Aboriginal Christians are repossessing the land and reclaiming a traditional, earth-bound, world-immanent spirituality. These Aboriginal understandings of colonisation (including missionisation) and Aboriginal ways of interpreting and understanding Christianity offer a unique contribution to the reconciliation process.

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.