Was Mounted Constable William Willshire really the cold-blooded killer of 'literally thousands' of Aboriginal people in Central Australia? Or was he the first white man to write a love poem to an Aboriginal woman? Was he both? Did the Finke River missionaries imprison and beat their recalcitrant converts, or did they mark out a future path for a people abandoned by South Australian society? Did the mission connive at the murder of the men who opposed them? Did they really convert anyone to Lutheran Christianity? And what did the people and governments of South Australia know and care about their northern frontier? Could a policeman be hanged for murder? This book goes beyond the stereotypes to answer these questions. It brings back to life some remarkable people.

First Australians is the dramatic story of the collision of two worlds that created contemporary Australia. Told from the perspective of Australia's first people, it vividly brings to life the events that unfolded when the oldest living culture in the world was overrun by the world's greatest empire. Seven of Australia's leading historians reveal the true stories of individuals—both black and white—caught in an epic drama of friendship, revenge, loss and victory in Australia's most transformative period of history. Their story begins in 1788 in Warrane, now known as Sydney, with the friendship between an Englishman, Governor Phillip, and the kidnapped warrior Bennelong. It ends in 1992 with Koiki Mabo's legal challenge to the foundation of Australia. By illuminating a handful of extraordinary lives spanning two centuries, First Australians reveals, through their eyes, the events that shaped a new nation. Note: This is the unillustrated version ofFirst Australians.

The Aboriginal Australians first arrived on the continent at least 60,000 years ago, occupying and adapting to a range of environmental conditions—from tropical estuarine habitats, densely forested regions, open plains, and arid desert country to cold, mountainous, and often wet and snowy high country. Cultures adapted according to the different conditions and adapted again to environmental changes brought about by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. European colonization of the island continent in 1788 not only introduced diseases to which Aborigines had no immunity but also began an enduring and at times violent conflict over land and resources. Reconciliation between Aborigines and the settler population remains unresolved. This second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Australian Aborigines contains a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and more than 300 cross-referenced entries on the politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture of the Aborigines. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the indigenous people of Australia.

It's a tale that doesn't seem like it would be a winner; an improbable proposition of a ten-mile reef of gold in the middle of the continent, a cabal of scheming investors, a farrago of poor planning and preposterous publicity, the fiasco of the prematurely celebrated triumph of technology over unforgiving terrain, a dead prospector - and no gold. The Central Australian Gold Exploration Company had it all, and Lasseter's Last Ride was in the stores before the final chapter of the real-life debacle had closed. It was a runaway success. Angus and Robertson sold three million copies of Ion Idriess' sixty-some books before he died in 1979. But in 1931, as he was working on what would be Lasseter's Last Ride, he was looking for an angle. In filling the gaps between the few facts with detailed descriptions of lands and people he had never seen, he found it - and promoted it - in Magic and Mystery. Idriess' fictional account of the last months of the life of Harold Bell Lasseter gave birth to a legend that has repeated in dozens of books, films, poems, podcasts, websites and exhibitions, is memorialised in the names of a highway and a casino, and has spawned searches and scams that continue nearly a century later. Idriess was probably surprised at its success and chose not to tamper with a winning formula when inconvenient material soon emerged. To do that he had to control the evidence and continued to insist on his narrative's unimpeachable adherence to fact. Reef Madness exposes how Idriess confected his first successful book and why the story of a failed prospector became a quintessentially Australian myth.

Winner of the 2022 W.K. Hancock Prize presented by the Australian Historical Association Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister's Literary Awards in the Australian History Category presented by the Australian Prime Minister and Minister for the Arts Winner of the 2021 Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award presented by the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA), a section of the American Anthropological Association By analyzing one of the world's greatest collections of Indigenous song, myth, and ceremony—the collections of linguist/anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow—Ceremony Men demonstrates how inextricably intertwined ethnographic collections can become in complex historical and social relations. In revealing his process to return an anthropological collection to Aboriginal communities in remote central Australia, Jason M. Gibson highlights the importance of personal rapport and collaborations in ethnographic exchange, both past and present, and demonstrates the ongoing importance of sociality, relationship, and orality when Indigenous peoples encounter museum collections today. Combining forensic historical analysis with contemporary ethnographic research, this book challenges the notion that anthropological archives will necessarily become authoritative or dominant statements on a people's cultural identity. Instead, Indigenous peoples will often interrogate and recontextualize this material with great dexterity as they work to reintegrate the documented into their present-day social lives. By theorizing the nature of the documenter-documented relationships this book makes an important contribution to the simplistic postcolonial generalizations that dominate analyses of colonial interaction. A story of local agency is uncovered that enriches our understanding of the human engagements that took, and continue to take, place within varying colonial relations of Australia.

This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, exploring the cultural and environmental history of these drylands.

In a series of newly commissioned essays by both established and emerging scholars, Globalization and Contemporary Art probes the effects of internationalist culture and politics on art across a variety of media. Globalization and Contemporary Art is the first anthology to consider the role and impact of art and artist in an increasingly borderless world. First major anthology of essays concerned with the impact of globalization on contemporary art Extensive bibliography and a full index designed to enable the reader to broaden knowledge of art and its relationship to globalization Unique analysis of the contemporary art market and its operation in a globalized economy