Dhoombak Goobgoowana means ‘truth telling’ in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people on whose unceded lands several University of Melbourne campuses are located. This is a book about race and how it has been constructed by academics in the University. It is also about power and how academics have wielded it and justified its use against Indigenous populations, and about knowledge, especially the Indigenous knowledge that silently contributed to many early research projects and collection endeavours. Although many things have changed, the stain of the past remains. But the University no longer wishes to look away.

Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko tells two extraordinary stories set five generations apart. Torches Queensland’s colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future.

This updated edition charts the journey of this nation-building reform from the earliest stages of Indigenous advocacy, explores myths and misconceptions and, importantly, explains how the Voice offers change that will benefit the whole nation.

Australia was not peacefully settled; it was taken by force through strategic, political and military campaigns. The early colony was militarised to protect it from foreign attacks, to maintain civil order over the convict population, and to suppress Aboriginal resistance against colonial interests. Defining the decades of armed, violent conflicts between sovereign First Nations and the colonists as “wars”, is often contested. However, the historical records from this period included this specific term to describe events on the frontier. The ongoing refusal to recognise this history of First Nations warriors and their adversaries denies them the memory, and the respect, they deserve.

Aboriginal lawyer, writer and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island off the Queensland coast 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 colonisers’ stories. Exploring works as diverse as Robinson Crusoe and Coonardoo, Behrendt looks at the stereotypes embedded in these accounts, including the assumption of cannibalism and the myth of the noble savage. Ultimately, Finding Eliza shows how these stories not only reflect the values of their storytellers but also reinforce those values – and how, in Australia, this has contributed to a complex racial divide.

Rob Collins describes Indigenous inventions (SBS/NITV, four episodes, June-July 2023)