Before the Aeroplane Dance               Edwina Toohey

To the Torres Strait and Great Barrier Reef waters came ships from all nations, from Spanish galleons to trepang cutters and pearling luggers. In the wake of Captain Cook, Cook's Town became the doorway to the Palmer goldfield. The arrival of fortune seekers, adventurers, plantation owners and beach combers in this region meant life would never be the same again for its original people.

This is the untold story of the Torres Strait Islands and Cape York Peninsula in a text that abounds with strange tales, lively personal historians, thrilling detail and anecdote.

(The) Biggest Estate on Earth - How Aborigines made Australia   -   Bill Gammage

Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.

Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised. For over a decade, Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it. With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires we now experience. And what we think of as virgin bush in a national park is nothing of the kind.

Black, White & in Between

Arthur Dimer's life has been that of the bushmen, horse and camel breaker, shepherd, boundary rider, mine worker and plant operator. Yet as a man whose grandmothers were full-descent women of the Ngadju and Mirning peoples, the traditional inhabitants of the south-west Nullarbor region, he is also an integral part of a much older system of law and land ownership. 180pp.

Blood on the Wattle

Bruce Elder. From the preface "this book has no thesis. It tries, probably unsuccessfully, to grind no polemical axes and to cast no judgments. It seeks to achieve only two things (a) to draw together in a single volume, most of the information about the massacres of Aboriginal people...(b) to create a broad-based awareness of the scale of the massacres...".

Boomerang Behind An Australian Icon

Philip Jones

In this book, Philip Jones draws on the world's largest boomerang collection, housed at the South Australian Museum, to describe the boomerang's traditional uses and it s more recent flight into western culture. There has rarely been such a stimulating and comprehensive survey of a traditional artefact.   

Boomerang Info

Ian King

The contents of this book is designed to provide the reader with a general overview of the different types of Boomerangs and their relevant uses.

Born in the Desert

Bush Food

Jennifer Isaacs.

For perhaps fifty thousand years the Aboriginal people have lived and lived well, in Australia. They have developed a unique knowledge of native plants and a deep understanding of the value of many animal products. this book is an exploration of these traditional skills and a compendium of the kinds of foods eaten by Aborigines.

Bush Foods

Margaret Kemarre Turner & John Henderson

From the complex, ritual preparation and distribution of a kangaroo, to the simplicity of enjoying the sweet nectar dripping from a corkwood blossom, Bush Foods describes the traditional foods of the Arrernte of Central Australia.

Margaret Kemarre Turner, a respected Arrernte woman, reveals in her own language a resourceful people with an intimate knowledge of their country.