The Pilbara, a large, thinly populated region in the north of Western Australia, has become central to the Australian economy and imagination. With millions of tons of iron ore shipped to China, the Pilbara is a media staple, through stories of mining companies' profits, the earnings of fly-in-fly-out workers, and the wealth of new entrepreneurs. For all this, what we know about a vital region such as the Pilbara remains incomplete. The boomtime stories do not reveal much about the Pilbara itself, a place completely transformed across fifty years of mining. No one has acknowledged the Pilbara's ancient history, or the men and women who worked there from the 1960s, building unions and making communities as they worked the mines. In those days, the Pilbara excited both hope and dread about its workers and their power. "From the deserts prophets come," AD Hope wrote years before in his poem, Australia. And it appeared that the Pilbara might be the site of a novel kind of unionism, with workers winning not only high wages but control of the places where they worked and the towns where they lived. But it was not to be. Starting in the 1980s, the companies fought back, defeating the unions and remaking the Pilbara. The managers were now the prophets, with new ways of organising work and managing workers. The companies reinvented the Pilbara through workplace control, fly-in-fly-out labor, and twelve-hour shifts. Their vision reshaped not just the desert but the cities, not just the work in mines and ports but in offices and shops. When the biggest boom in mining history came along, it unfolded across a Pilbara landscape very different from a generation earlier. The union prophets were gone; the companies' profits grew. This book reveals the story of fifty years of conflict over work and life in the Pilbara, and how this conflict has affected the rest of Australia. [Subject: Australian Studies, Labor History]

Spending time in the Pilbara region of Western Australia as part of the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission, Sydney lawyer Noel Olive began listening to, and then recording, the stories and experiences of the local Indigenous people. That material forms the basis of a history from an Aboriginal perspective of Aboriginal-European relations in the region, from colonial times to present day. The author previously edited a book of Aboriginal histories from the same region (Karijini Mirlimirli FACP 1997), which was well received by reviewers and is a recommended text in both the legal profession and Aboriginal Studies courses.

"A trilogy of remarkable stories about campaigns for Aboriginal rights. But the most curious thing about this book is that the central characters in this book are not Aborigines. Some of the 'different white people' you will meet in these pages are well known Australians, but many are not. But they all had one crucial common characteristic: a single-minded determination to support and protect the rights of Aboriginal people."

Kim Beazley, Australian ambassador to the US: ‘Peter Coppin is an exceptional figure… His was a clarion call for justice and his life remains relevant today. This is a timely update of Jolly Read’sexcellent work.’ Prof. Pat Dodson, known colloquially as the ‘Father of Reconciliation’: ‘The Pilbara strike was an important and inspiring milestone in the battle for justice, rights, equality and recognition for Indigenous people.’ An updated edition of an epic and remarkable story. In this powerful memoir, Peter Coppin’s story emerges; told in fragments, moments of time and memories. A senior Nyamal lawman, Coppin was born in Yarrie country in Western Australia’s Pilbara. His was a life of danger, drama and hardship; his people forced to work on pastoral stations for meagre rations, their lives subject to the whims of white pastoralists, government agents and legislators. But Coppin dreamed of a life for his people where they could access education and health services, and control their destinies. Despite great danger to themselves, he and others took part in the first Aboriginal strike in Australia, the Pilbara Strike in 1946. For Peter Coppin the land holds mysteries; it’s special and lifegiving and some of it, sacred. Initially uncertain about telling of his extraordinary life and culture, working with trusted friend Jolly Read, the tales spilled forth, building, the fragments into a whole, little by little, tape by tape. To those who asked him questions he said: ‘What are you asking me these questions for anyway? Just read the book’. Kangkushot provides valuable insights into the rich and spiritual way Aboriginal people view their lives and land, and their place in it.

A collection of essays by various Australian and European authors on a wide range of Australian cultural topics, this is a story of struggle and achievement and occasional failure. Departures deals with innovation and transgression in Australian literature and history and brings out the vitality of Australian culture as it meets new challenges.