Capricornia

′Capricornia will always be one of the greatest of Australian novels, a defining work in the search for what it is, or was, to be Australian.′ Australian Book Review

Spanning three generations, Capricornia tells the story of Australia′s North. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians, of chance relationships that can form bonds for life, of dispossession, murder and betrayal.

In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth, clad in serge suits and bowler hats, arrive in Port Zodiac on the coast of Capricornia. They are clerks who have come from the South to join the Capricornian Government Service. Oscar prospers, and takes to his new life as a gentleman. Mark, however, is restless, and takes up with old Ned Krater, a trepang fisherman, who tells him tales of the sea and the islands, introduces him to drink, and boasts of his conquests of Aboriginal women -- or ′Black Velvet′, as they are called.

But it is Mark′s son, Norman, whose struggles to find a place in the world embody the complexities of Capricornia itself.

′My Capricornia is a hymn book written in adoration of Australia ... the Land of the Unshackled Southern Cross, the Australian earth itself, out of a passionate love of which alone can a true Australian Nation grow.′ Xavier Herbert

Andrew Stojanovski

Dog Ear Cafe is a true-life adventure story about how one Aboriginal community beat the odds and defeated petrol sniffing. It tells of the Mt Theo Petrol Sniffing Program: a story of culture clash, of two lines of fire that meet in the desert night, of partnerships that cross Australia's racial divide. 316pp.

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by Donald Thompson.

"A rare matter of fact description of indigenous culture" - Quadrant.

I had lived and hunted with these people, accompanied them on their nomadic wanderings and learned their customs and their languages with the result that I understood and believed in them and resented the injustices under which they had suffered for so long at the hands of the white man and other invaders of their territory.

In The Desert

Pat Lowe

Jimmy Pike is one of Australia's most famous Aboriginal artists, represented in collections in all major Australian public galleries and museums. He grew up in the Great Sandy Desert during the 1940s and 1950s. This is his story as told by his lifetime partner, English-born Pat Lowe, who spent three years in the desert with him, and many more years listening to his stories. This remarkable and intimate account of what was a traditional Walmajarri boyhood, one of the last of its kind, opens your eyes to a completely different culture and way of experiencing the world. The startling fact is that after 60,000 years following a nomadic, hunter-gatherer way of life, the exodus of the Walmajarri people from the desert occurred in only one or two generations after white settlement.

In 1936, Daryl Tonkin and his brother, Harry, leave home in search of adventure. They find themselves in West Gippsland, Victoria and set up a timber mill at Jackson's Track - a dreamtime place, a place that was paradise.

A bushman dedicated to his work, Daryl discovers happiness there - and unexpectedly falls in love. But Daryl is white and Euphie is black and neither of them is prepared for the conflict their forbidden love ignites.

An unforgettable true story of joy, of tragedy and of hop, which has won the hearts of Australians. 300pp.

Defined as a half-caste, Jimmy Governor challenged the white man's Aboriginal stereotype of 1900 – he was highly intelligent, better educated than many of his white contemporaries, personable, a hard worker, did not drink alcohol, and married to a white woman. Only the colour of his skin prevented any rise from the lowest rung of white society.

On the cold winter night of July 20, 1900, Jimmy Governor and Jacky Underwood smashed their way into the Mawbey homestead at Breelong and began killing women and children. In Australia's greatest manhunt lasting one hundred and one days, over one hundred police and civilians pursued Jimmy Governor and his brother Joe through the Australian bush, on foot, for four thousand kilometres. Using meticulous research, Maurie Garland sheds new light on the Governor and Mawbey families to provide a new analysis of the story that gripped Australia in 1900.

King Brown Country

Walkley award-winning journalist Russell Skelton presents a devastatingly revealing portrait of Papunya, a Western Desert community that once showed such promise, now a community in severe crisis.

'Why don't you check out Papunya? It's the sniffing capital of Australia, it's a Bermuda triangle for taxpayer funds. Nobody in the NT government gives a rats. The council just tossed out World Vision. People are frightened to talk.'
For award-winning journalist Russell Skelton a five year journey of inquiry that coincided with one of the biggest shifts in indigenous policy in Australian history began on the day he received this email. Set with the backdrop of Papunya, a Northern Territory Aboriginal community whose history showed so much promise but whose dysfunction is now more prominent that its famous artwork, this is a book that had to be written.
Digging down into the core of indigenous issues today, Skelton exposes unmitigated misery, shocking levels of neglect and the devastating consequences of substance abuse. But above all, he reveals how systematic failure of indigenous policy betrayed a once secure community. He also introduces us to Alison Anderson, the woman whose presence has so dominated Papunya and the politics of the Northern Territory
King Brown Country is a powerful and shaming portrait of a community in crisis. Papunya remains an emblem for the failure of all Australians to come to terms with the continent's oldest inhabitants.

Knights of the Boomerang