Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact. Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy. In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia’s story can best be told.
Written and illustrated by over 150 First Nations children and published by the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council. Chapter headings: Dreaming, Old Time, The Macassans, The Whitefellas, Today, My Country.
A comprehensive military history of frontier conflict in Australia. Covering the first 50 years of British occupation, it examines in detail how both sides fought on the frontier and how Aborigines developed a form of warfare differing from tradition.
Rachel Perkins journeys across the country to explore the bloody battles fought on Australian soil and the war that established the Australian nation, seeking to change the narrative of the nation.
Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised, with an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire, the life cycles of native plants, and the natural flow of water to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year.