Reading list

At just ten years old, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts was forcibly removed – stolen – from her family, community and kinship systems. After eight years in various out-of-home care placements, Vanessa fled the system, reconnected with kin and returned to country for the very first time. Only then did she begin to heal. In this book, Vanessa embarks on an extraordinary work of truth-telling, exposing the ongoing violence visited on Black children, their families and their communities by the systems that claim to protect them.

Explores the impact of Indigenous storytelling at the ABC, and how it has created deep and honest conversations about the experience of First Nations journalists, storytellers, and presenters.

Lowitja O'Donoghue is a truly great Australian. She is arguably our nation's most recognised Indigenous woman. A powerful and unrelenting advocate for her people, an inspiration for many, a former Australian of the Year, she sat opposite Prime Minister Paul Keating in the first negotiations between an Australian government and Aboriginal people and changed the course of the nation.

Aims to visually (digitally) present the resistance wars in south-eastern Queensland 1820-50 in an easily-digestible and informative manner, by combining maps, images and brief explanations. Dr Kerkhove seeks to better illustrate the typical lifestyle of settlers and Aborigines caught in the resistance wars. He also seeks to develop historical maps that better reflect what was happening from an ‘Aboriginal resistance’ perspective.

The Maralinga people survive aggressive colonisation, including dispossession to enable atomic testing, and, through their tenacious spirit and cultural strength, fight to retain their country.

In 1838, eleven convicts and former convicts were put on trial for the brutal murder of 28 Aboriginal men, women and children at Myall Creek in northern New South Wales. The trial created an enormous amount of controversy because it was almost unknown for Europeans to be charged with the murder of Aborigines. It would become the most serious trial of mass murder in Australia’s history. The trial’s prosecutor was the Attorney General of New South Wales, John Hubert Plunkett. It proved to be Plunkett’s greatest test, as it pitted his forensic brilliance and his belief in equality before the law against the combined forces of the free settlers, the squatters, the military, the emancipists, the newspapers, and even the convict population.

Proposes that we need to multiply by several times the existing estimates of pre-contact Aboriginal populations and to revise radically our understanding of why their numbers declined. We may even need to think about black population destruction as an act of genocide.

The story of the twelve Regional Dialogues and the Uluru National Constitutional Convention, attended by 1500 everyday First Peoples. The unanimous result was the Uluru Statement From The Heart, and its call for Voice and Makarrata.

Explores the nature and extent of violence on South Australia's frontiers in light of the foundational promise to provide Aboriginal people with the protection of the law, and the resonances of that history in social memory. What do we find when we compare the history of the frontier with the patterns of how it is remembered and forgotten? And what might this reveal about our understanding of the nation's history and its legacies in the present?

Regularly features articles relevant to First Nations history, the Voice and Frontier Wars

A novel about one of Australia's first true heroes, Pemulwuy. A proud and feared Aboriginal warrior, Pemulwuy leads an uncompromising twelve-year war (1788-1802) against British colonial oppression and makes the supreme sacrifice in order to guide his people to safety.

A landmark history of Australia's first successful settler farming area, which was on the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. Award-winning historian Grace Karskens uncovers the everyday lives of ordinary people in the early colony, both Aboriginal and British.