Richard Broome

The vast sweeping story of Aboriginal Australia from 1788 is told in Richard Broome's typical lucid and imaginative style. This is an important work of great scholarship, passion, and imagination. Professor Lynette Russell, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University In the creation of any new society, there are winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew...

Early Europeans saw Victoria and its rolling grasslands as Australia felix—happy south land—a prize left for them by God. For its original inhabitants, their Country was home and life, not to be relinquished without a fierce struggle. Richard Broome tells the story of the impact of European ideas, guns, killer microbes, and a pastoral economy on the networks of kinship,...

Fighting Hard tells a history of the Aborigines Advancement League, the oldest Aboriginal organisation in Australia. As both a welfare and activist body, the League can be seen as the "mother" of all Aboriginal Victorian community organisations, having spawned a diverse range of organisations. The League influenced the fight for civil rights and took a stand against the government's assimilation...

An updated edition of this remarkable story, with a new postscript. Visier Meyasetsu Sany, his family, and fellow villagers of Khonoma, fled for their lives to the jungles of Nagaland in 1956. He and his family survived privations and starvation for over two years, though many others did not. Visier emerged from the jungle aged eight and into a turbulent...

Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government-backed settlement schemes devastated lives...