Adult Nonfiction

In My Blood It Runs, directed by Maya Newell, is an intimate and compassionate observational documentary from the perspective of a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy in Alice Springs, Australia, struggling to balance his traditional Arrernte/Garrwa upbringing with a state education.

Adult Nonfiction

Behrendt, Larissa. Finding. UQP, 2016.
A vital Aboriginal perspective on colonial storytelling Indigenous lawyer and writer Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the local Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island in 1836. In this deeply personal book, Behrendt uses Eliza's tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people – and indigenous people of other countries – have been portrayed in their colonizers' stories. Citing works as diverse as Robinson Crusoe and Coonardoo, she explores the tropes in these accounts, such as the supposed promiscuity of Aboriginal women, the Europeans' fixation on cannibalism, and the myth of the noble savage. Ultimately, Behrendt shows how these stories not only reflect the values of their storytellers but also reinforce those values – which in Australia led to the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the laws enforced against them.

Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788. Allen & Unwin, 2019.
Richard Broome tells the history of Australia from the standpoint of the original Australians: those who lost most in the early colonial struggle for power. Surveying over two centuries of Aboriginal-European encounters, he shows how white settlers steadily supplanted the original inhabitants, from the shining coasts to inland deserts, by sheer force of numbers, disease, technology and violence. He also tells the story of Aboriginal survival through resistance and accommodation, and traces the continuing Aboriginal struggle to move from the margins of a settler society to a more central place in modern Australia.

Grant, Stan. Australia Day. Harper Collins, 2019.
In this book, Australia Day, his long-awaited follow up to Talking to My Country, Stan talks about our country, about who we are as a nation, about the indigenous struggle for belonging and identity in Australia, and what it means to be Australian. A sad, wise, beautiful, reflective and troubled book, Australia Day asks the questions that have to be asked, that no else seems to be asking. Who are we? What is our country? How do we move forward from here?

Leahy, Cathy and Ryan, Judith. Colony: Australia 1779-1861/Frontier Wars. Thames & Hudson Australia Pty, Limited, 2019.
It is now over 250 years since James Cook and his crew set sail in the Endeavour to explore the Pacific. In 1770 they reached the east coast of a continent that has been inhabited for more than 65,000 years by many indigenous groups with different languages and diverse cultures. Cook’s landing marked the beginning of a history that still has repercussions today, a history that both unites and divides Australia and highlights the continuing need for reconciliation. Colony explores the immediate and far-reaching impact of British colonisation of Australia through historical, twentieth-century and contemporary art. Through 1000 essential pieces of our cultural heritage, this book highlights the confronting and complex perspectives of the shared history of First Peoples and European settlers.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talking Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. University of Queensland Press, 2002.
In this accessible and provocative analysis of the whiteness of Australian feminism the author applies academic training and cultural knowledge in revealing the invisible position of power and privilege in feminist practice. This is a uniquely Australian contribution to the increasing global discourse on feminism and race.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession.
Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism.Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines.

Morgan, Sally. My Place. Seaver Books, 1988.
Looking at the views and experiences of three generations of indigenous Australians, this autobiography unearths political and societal issues contained within Australia's indigenous culture. Sally Morgan traveled to her grandmother's birthplace, starting a search for information about her family. She uncovers that she is not white but aborigine--information that was kept a secret because of the stigma of society. This moving account is a classic of Australian literature that finally frees the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

NPY Women's Council Aboriginal Corporation. Traditional Healers of the Central Desert, 2013.
This book contains unique stories and imagery and primary source material: the ngangkari speak directly to the reader. Ngangkari are senior Aboriginal people authorized to speak publicly about Anangu (Western Desert language speaking Aboriginal people) culture and practices. It is accurate, authorized information about their work, in their own words.
The practice of traditional healing is still very much a part of contemporary Aboriginal society. The ngangkari currently employed at NPY Women’s Council deliver treatments to people across a tri-state region of about 350,000 sq km, in more than 25 communities in SA, WA and NT. Acknowledged, respected and accepted these ngangkari work collaboratively with hospitals and health professionals even beyond this region, working hand in hand with Western medical practitioners.

Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?Magala Books, 2014.
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 - behaviors 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 comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.

Pearson, Noel. Up from the Mission: Selected Writings. Black Inc., 2011.
Pearson evokes his early life in Hope Vale, Queensland. He includes sections of his epoch-making essay Our Right To Take Responsibility, which exposed the trap of passive welfare and proposed new ways forward. There are pieces on the apology; on Barack Obama and black leadership; on Australian party politics – Keating, Howard and Rudd; and on alcoholism, despair and what can be done to mend aboriginal communities that have fallen apart.

Pederson, Howard and Woorunmurra, Banjo.Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance. Magabala Books, 1995.
The true story of the Aboriginal resistance fighter, Jandamarra, whose legend is etched into the Australian landscape. Set in the Kimberley outback during the late nineteenth century, the last stage of Australia's invasion is played out in the lands of the Bunuba people. Leases are marked across Aboriginal country and, amidst the chaos and turmoil, extraordinary and sometimes contradictory relationships develop. A powerful collaboration between a non-Indigenous historian and the Indigenous custodians of the Jandamarra story.

Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. NewSouth Publishing, 2006.
The publication of this book in 1981 profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. It has since become a classic of Australian history. Drawing from documentary and oral evidence, the book describes in meticulous and compelling detail the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans. Henry Reynolds' argument that the Aborigines resisted fiercely was highly original when it was first published and is no less challenging today.

Tilmouth, William. 7 August, 2018. “Indigenous Children do not need to be fixed – they need rights and opportunities.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/07/indigenous-children-dont-need-to-be-fixed-they-need-rights-and-opportunitiesIn this article, a key advisor on In My Blood it Runs examines the deficit views that Western schooling structures, systems, and practices placed upon Aboroginal children and advocates for a contemporary approach to educating indigenous children in ways that support their identity-formation and honors their ancestral heritage as Aborginal children.

Turner, Margaret Kemarre. Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What It Means to Be an Aboriginal Person. IAD Press, 2010.
Written from the heart of Australia’s central deserts by Dujan’s grandmother, a respected Arrernte elder, this account explains the Australian Aboriginal approach to kinship in personal and poetic terms. Revealing a sophisticated and robust culture deeply connected to its native land, this book describes the far-reaching and penetrating organization of every respectful relationship—such as those between family members, amongst the society as a whole, and with regard to the denizen plants and animals. Through story-telling, the aboriginal community as well as non-Indigenous peoples will come to appreciate this fascinating culture.

Wright, Alexis. Tracker.Artarmon, Australia: Giramondo Publishing, 2017.
Taken from his family as a child and brought up in a mission on Croker Island, Tracker Tilmouth worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles, including Director of the Central Land Council of the Northern Territory.
Tracker was a visionary, a strategist and a projector of ideas, renowned for his irreverent humour and his determination to tell things the way he saw them. Having known him for many years, Alexis Wright interviewed Tracker, along with family, friends, colleagues, and the politicians he influenced, weaving his and their stories together in a manner reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize–winning author Svetlana Alexievich. The book is as much a testament to the powerful role played by storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life as it is to the legacy of an extraordinary man.