First Nations Resources

Revealing the forgotten stories of Aboriginal convicts, this book describes how they lived, laboured, were punished, and died. Profiling several of the 130 Aboriginal convicts who were transported to and within the Australian penal colonies, this collection features the journeys of Aboriginal warriors Bulldog and Musquito, Maori warrior Hohepa Te Umuroa, and Khoisan soldier Booy Piet.

This book places the Aboriginal occupation of Australia within a broad framework of human evolution and habitation. The author discusses the pioneering studies that delve into the mists of antiquity, and he engages with current controversies, including the extinction of megafauna, land management practices, and social development over many millennia. The extraordinary achievements of Australian Aborigines are revealed in all their complexity and the evidence surrounding the identity of Australia's first occupants is re-examined.

As Europeans moved into new lands in Queensland in the 19th century, violent encounters with local Aboriginals mostly followed. Drawing on extensive original research, Timothy Bottoms tells the story of the most violent frontier in Australian colonial history.

Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating, and storing - behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence in Dark Emu comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.

In the campaign against Japan in the Pacific during the Second World War, the armed forces of the United States, Australia, and the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea made use of indigenous peoples in new capacities. The United States had long used American Indians as soldiers and scouts in frontier conflicts and in wars with other nations. With the advent of the Navajo Code Talkers in the Pacific theater, Native servicemen were now being employed for contributions that were unique to their Native cultures. In contrast, Australia, Papua, and New Guinea had long attempted to keep indigenous peoples out of the armed forces altogether. With the threat of Japanese invasion, however, they began to bring indigenous peoples into the military as guerilla patrollers, coast watchers, and regular soldiers. Defending Whose Country? is a comparative study of the military participation of Papua New Guineans, Yolngu, and Navajos in the Pacific theater.

Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas, but there are no official commemorations of the battles fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists. Delving into why it is more controversial to talk about the frontier war now than it was 100 years ago, Forgotten War continues the story told in Henry Reynolds seminal book The Other Side of the Frontier, which argues that the settlement of Australia had a high level of violence and conflict that people chose to ignore. That book prompted a flowering of research and fieldwork that Reynolds draws on here to give a thorough and systematic account of what caused the frontier wars, how many people died, and whether the colonists themselves saw frontier conflict as a form of warfare. This powerful book makes it clear that there can be no reconciliation in Australia without acknowledging the wars fought on its own soil.

Both 250 years late and extremely timely, this is an account of what First Nations people saw and felt when James Cook navigated their shores in 1770. We know the European story from diaries, journals and letters. For the first time, this is the other side. Who were the people watching the Endeavour sail by? How did they understand their world and what sense did they make of this strange vision? And what was the impact of these first encounters with Europeans? The answers lie in tales passed down from 1770 and in truth-telling of the often more brutal engagements that followed.