Ancient Australia: Home

Loving Country is a powerful and essential guidebook that offers a new way to travel and discover Australia through an Indigenous narrative. The authors show travellers how to see the country as herself, to know her whole and old story, and to find the way to fall in love with her, our home. Featuring 18 places in detail, from the ingenious fish traps at Brewarrina and the rivers that feed the Great Barrier Reef, to the love stories of Wiluna and the whale story of Margaret River, there is so much to celebrate. This immersive book covers history, Dreaming stories, traditional cultural practices, Indigenous tours and the importance of recognition and protection of place.

Aboriginal artists today practise in the world's longest continuous tradition of art - and perhaps the last to be generally recognised. Widely sought after, Aboriginal art has now taken its place in the collections of the great museums and galleries. This is|the first concise survey of the full range of all the work of Australia's indigenous artists from all parts of the continent. Building on traditions that stretch back at least fifty millenia, these artists have worked in a variety of contexts, from the sacred and secret realm|of ceremony to more public spheres, and in media that include painting, sculpture, engraving, constructions, weaving, photography, printmaking, and textile design. Rich and complex beliefs embodied in the Dreaming are expressed in art with many layers of meaning that reflects a unique world-view. Present-day enthusiasm for Aboriginal art testifies to its persistent dynamism and vitality.

For travellers who want to understand Australia's 50,000-year-old cultural tradition. More than 60 indigenous people have contributed to this guide, together with some of Lonely Planet's most experienced guidebook researchers. Includes an introduction to indignenous languages.

Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England.

In this rich and unique collection from the Australian past, the author retells the stories of an ancient tradition and compares their underlying themes with a fascinating selection of myths and Moon lore from around the world. Some are simple efforts to explain|the natural world of the hunter-gatherer, but many are creations of great power which are illuminated by the paintings to make this a book of much visual charm and beauty.

The dramatic story of the collision of two worlds that created contemporary Australia. Told from the perspective of Australia's first people, it vividly brings to life the events that unfolded when the oldest living culture in the world was overun by the world's greatest empire.

The process of historical inquiry and the skills of a historian are highlighted in the Introduction and are developed and explored throughout the text. Interesting and appropriate sources provide opportunities to focus on the skills of: sequencing and recalling; investigating and researching; analysis, synthesis, interpretation and using evidence; communication and explaining; empathetic understanding; and asking historical questions.

An atlas is a way of representing, in graphic form, a human landscape - a pattern of human activities in space and time. This book opens up a window onto the landscape of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives, from 60,000 years ago to the present time.

A superior memoir by an accomplished writer at the height of her powers. For 40,000 years the Central NSW area of Wellington was Aboriginal Wiradjuri land. Following the arrival of white men, it became a penal settlement, mission station, gold mining town and farming centre with a history of white comfort and black marginalisation.

One of the most interesting art movements of modern times began when art teacher Geoffrey Bardon, working in the Papunya settlement 250 miles from Alice Springs in the Western desert of Australia, asked a group of children to paint their school house with the curious design motifs he had noticed. The youngsters asked their elders to do it. From those first five rudimentary|school murals, Bardon supplied the Aboriginals with paints, brushes and canvases, spawning the creation of art that has attracted buyers around the world. The idea spread like wild yams in the bush. At first, only men were the painters of the sacred images being transferred from body and rock to two-dimensional surfaces. Today, men and women Aboriginal artists both contribute to this outpouring. This book covers the developments in each settlement as the world's oldest, continuous art evolved into an art that is comfortable on gallery walls everywhere because of its patterns and bold colors. The visuals, arcs, concentric circles, parallel lines point to eternal ideas in the Aboriginal culture, ideograms that bear the weight of 50,000 years and provide us with a new kind of seeing.

Tells the story of Australian Aboriginal history and society from its distant beginnings to the present day. From the wisdom and paintings of the Dreamtime to the first contacts between Europeans and indigenous Australians, right through to modern times, it offers an insight into the life and experiences of the world's oldest culture. The resilience and adaptability of Aboriginal people over millennia is one of the great human stories of all time.

The most comprehensive and important work of its kind. The book covers everything from documented archaeological traditions and art styles, through to the development of the remarkably diverse contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art practices that have attracted so much attention in recent years.

For many indigenous Australians the act of painting is a kind of personal religious communion between artist and the ancestral creation beings that made the country. This sense of ancestral precedent is most strongly felt in this collection of illustrated essays which focus on western and eastern Arnhem Land.

This book is fiction and non-fiction. The fictional part tells the stories of six white castaways or runaways who were found and cared for by Indigenous groups. There are five pairs of stories. Each pair of stories has one written by an Indigenous author and one by a non-Indigenous author. All five stories are based on historical records. After each story there is a non-fiction section that tells the true story from history.

Collection of traditional stories from various language groups across Australia; illustrated by Yorta Yorta artist Clive Bidja Atkinson.

Welcome to Country is essential reading for every young Australian. The chapters cover prehistory, post-colonial history, language, kinship, knowledge, art, performance, storytelling, native title, the Stolen Generations, making a rightful place for First Australians and looking to the future for Indigenous Australia. This book is for the new Australian generations and works towards rectifying the wrongs of this country's past.

n this picture book the indigenous and geographical story of Melbourne's beautiful Yarra River, from its source to its mouth; from its pre-history to the present day. An ode to Australian rivers, the flora and fauna that live on them, and the function they perform as a part of modern day life. Wilam brings Aboriginal life, culture and language right in to the heart of the city.

Using the accounts of early European explorers, colonists and farmers, Bruce Pascoe argues for a reconsideration of the hunter gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. He allows the reader to see Australia as it was before Europeans arrived, a land of cultivated farming areas, productive fisheries, permanent homes, and an understanding of the environment and its natural resources that supported thriving villages across the continent. Young Dark Emu, A Truer History asks young readers to consider a different version of Australia's history pre-European colonisation.