Böcker utgivna av Aboriginal Studies Press

Most non-Indigenous Australians know of Charles Perkins. Many are familiar with a few other Aboriginal leaders. Yet few have heard of William Cooper, one of the most important Aboriginal leaders in Australia''s history. "Thinking Black" tells the story of Cooper and the Australian Aborigines'' League, and their campaign for Aboriginal people''s rights. Through petitions to government, letters to other campaigners and organisations, and entreaties to friends and well-wishers, the book reveals their passionate struggle against dispossession and displacement, the denial of rights, and their fight to be citizens in their own country. Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus document the circumstances behind the most significant moments in Cooper''s political career -- his famous 1933 petition to King George V, his call for a ''Day of Mourning'' in 1938, the walk-off from Cummeragunja in 1939 and his opposition to an Aboriginal regiment in 1939. It explores the principles Cooper drew on in his campaigning, not least his ''Letter from an Educated Black'', surely one of the most intriguing political testaments by an Australian leader. "Thinking Black" sheds new light on the history of what it has meant to be Aboriginal in modern Australia. It reveals the rich and varied cultural traditions, both Aboriginal and British, religious and secular, that have informed Aboriginal people''s battle for justice, and their vision of equality in Australia of two peoples: equal yet distinct.

Reading Doctors Writing is a book for every Australian who reads or writes health research about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. However, its not just a story about medical progress. Medical research has been influenced by the politics of colonialism, the nationalist politics associated with Federation, and most importantly, by the politics of race, racism and anti-racism. This history of Indigenous health research fuels the suspicion felt by Indigenous people today about researchers, and research. Reading Doctors Writing invites those involved in Indigenous health research to confront rather than evade the history and politics of their work.

In 1964, a group of 20 Aboriginal women and children in the Western Desert made their first contact with European Australians -- patrol officers from the Woomera Rocket Range, clearing an area into which rockets were to be fired. They had been pursued by the patrol officers for several weeks, running from this frightening new force in the desert. This is their story told through oral history, archival research, photographs, and rare film footage.

This story that shows the Aboriginal people of the Katherine West Region knew their own health needs best, and had the ability to make the best decisions about these needs. This story tells of the courage of the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments in committing substantial sums of money, normally provided through their own bureaucracies, to an experimental model of health servicing. t tells of the absolute commitment of the Katherine West Health Board and its staff to finding the best possible mix of services for the communities they served -- integrating their responses to immediate and practical concerns with equal regard to the legacies of a complex history. This is a story of success achieved through innovation and cooperation, and above all a story of something very special.

Dhuuluu-Yala is a Wiradjuri phrase meaning ''to talk straight'' and this book is straight talk about publishing Indigenous literature in Australia. It also includes broader issues that writers need to consider: engaging with readers and reviewers. The book covers the period up to the mid-1900s, though some references are included up to 2000. Changes have been made since that date, however the issues identified in "Dhuuluu-Yala" remain current and to a large extent unresolved. The history of defining Aboriginality in Australia and the experience of being Aboriginal'' have both impacted on the production of Aboriginal writing today. These twin themes are the major focus of the book. The pioneering roles of Aboriginal writers who have gone before and created a space has allowed for the growth of an Indigenous publishing industry. Indeed, a literary and publishing culture have developed also because of the increasing desire and need for an authentic Indigenous voice in Australian literature. Although funding and other mechanisms are in place and possibilities afforded Indigenous writers have improved, opportunities are still limited, leading to some authors choosing to self-publish.

Claire Henty-Gebert''s life is remarkable and inspiring. Born in the late 1930s, the daughter of a white settler and an Alyawarra woman, Claire was four years old when she was taken to the Bungalow mission in Alice Springs. Much of her young life was spent on the newly formed Croker Island mission and she recalls happy days in the care of compassionate missionaries. Sent south to escape the threat from Japanese fighters during World War Two, Claire later returned to Croker Island and married. Inspired by others, Claire traced her Aboriginal family, however; she was never to meet her mother. Claire''s reminiscences and a wide selection of photos combine here with conventional documentary sources, cultural knowledge and people''s memories.

When that good old horse took me away from Borroloola on the long journey to Darwin, it changed my life forever ... I stopped being an Aboriginal girl and became a half-caste girl. From someone who had had so much, I was now some -had nothing, with no past and an unknown future. Hilda Muir was born on the very frontier of modern Australia near the outback town of Borroloola in the about 1920. Her early life was spent roaming the Gulf Country hunting and gathering with her family. Her mother was a Yanyuwa person, and so was Hilda. Known to the clan as Jarman, it mattered little that her father was an unknown white man. This small girl had a name, a loving family, and a secure Aboriginal identity. This book tells of Hilda''s bush childhood, and her force dremoval from a loving family to the rigours of life in the Kahlin Home for half-caste children. Hilda grew up to marry the love of her life, Billy Muir, and then had to learn to deal with the demands -of a growing family and evacuation to Brisbane during the Second World War. Back in Darwin -- and after the devastation of Cyclone Tracy, Hilda struggled to find her place in the world again. In 1995, Hilda Muir was one of those chosen to present a writ to the High Court on behalf of her fellow stolen-generation, asserting that the removals were illegal as well as immoral. In 1997 the writ was rejected by the High Court. In 2000 Hilda finally travelled back to her Yanyuwa land and v was recognised as an owner and custodian of that country. Today Hilda Muir. her Aboriginal children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are living reminders that governments cannot always shape human lives in ways they might wish.

In this witty and satirical revisiting of Australia''s heroic past, Craig Cormick rediscovers the contributions of indigenous Australians that have always remained unrecorded and unacknowledged, Australia''s unwritten histories. Drawing on original records of the time, he has turned the spotlight away from its traditional focus to illuminate those whom history had forgotten. Great explorers, teachers, warriors and dreamers, who were there when Banks first saw a banksia or when Burke and Wills staggered on from Coopers Creek, but have vanished simply because their stories were unrecorded, ''now repopulate these short stories. The old heroes confess their darkest secrets, facing their own culpability in the destruction of societies and cultures, or blindly march towards their own fame, stamping firmly on law, conscience, and their own better judgement in the process. Make way for a new history of Australia, in w hich Cook fancies an ice-cream, Kennedy is mobbed by the press, and Windradvne and landamarra. Wooredy and Trugernanna. Jacket'' Jacket'' and Johnny Mullagh act out the real past. The combination of delicious humour and fantasy, and the true horror that must arise from any reading of our indigenous history, makes this collection at once playful and mordant, funny and frightening, and an exciting new work of Australian fiction.

Between 1942 and 1945, Torres Strait Islander women experienced the fears and uncertainties of living virtually on Australia''s front line during the Pacific War. Some were forcibly evacuated with their children to the mainland, where they found themselves still restricted as to where and how they could live. Others were left on their tiny islands, deserted in the end by government and church, despite the constant threat of Japanese advance through the Torres Strait. Many of the women remember here that traumatic time: hiding from the bombers and watching the dogfights overhead, struggling to feed and clothe their families, and praying continually for the safe return of their men-folk and for peace again in their beloved island homes.

The road to Australia was a very long one indeed for Russian ethnographer -- Vladimir Kabo whose lifetime passion has been the study of this comment''s Aboriginal people. Continually denied permission to travel abroad for over 30 years, I dreamed of seeing Australia with my own eyes. At last, in 1990, came the opportunity -- and the vital passport. This eventful memoir records Vladimir Kabo''s early years and education, his time at the front in the Second World War and his banishment to a labour camp during which period he began to formulate his theories about early human society. After ''rehabilitation'' he was finally able to begin his life''s work in the St Petersburg museum among its artefact treasures from Australia, New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. Perestroika in the late 1980s brought Australian visitors, like Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), and also the possibility of a new life in the country he had studied for so many years. An afterward by archaeologist Rhys Jones provides an appreciation of Vladimir Kabo ''s scholarly work within the context of Soviet anthropological theory and Australian Aboriginal ethnography.

This collection of histories, in both written and illustrative form, from the women and men of Ernabella, in northern South Australia, tells the story of the interaction between white and black women that led to the establishment and development of a significant school of Australian art, Ernabella Arts Inc, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1998. From ''first missionary coming'', through the terror of the nearby atomic bomb tests in the 1950s, to the commercial and artistic successes of the 1990s, the stories speak of great losses and regrets, but also of remarkable achievements, and of the skill and strength of the individuals whose voices we hear. At Ernabella Arts, all the artistic output is produced by women and this, one of the oldest centres of contemporary Aboriginal art in the country, is best known for its distinctive design and its use of new and innovative media, such as those used in textile art. The beautiful batiks produced at Ernabella have been exhibited around the world and the artists are sought after as teachers all over Australia, and internationally. These artists, when asked to explain their designs by those who are unaware of their non-representational nature, say ''don''t ask for stories''. We are lucky, however, that they have chosen to record their stories in other ways, and in the process have given their readers a striking insight into their lives and work.

This is the inside story of the Mabo case, a unique court drama where rights and interests previously unknown to Anglo-Australian law came to be recognised by the High Court of Australia. In far north-east Australia lie the homelands of the Meriam, a dynamic seafaring, fishing and gardening people. They explained in court, often eloquently, how their ''cultural way'' retains a fidelity to distinctive principles while also accommodating new ideas and techniques. In the name of Meriam law they also defended their right to land passed between generations by the spoken word. Their right to land carries with it a moral and practical responsibility to other Meriam and to the land itself. Meriam culture, often diminished in the hearing of evidence, has an original contribution to make to future Meriam, to the rest of Australia and to the world. In exploring the role of native title in the reshaping of Australian identity, some of the deeper questions of cultural diversity and self-determination are identified.

In 1976, Bill Rosser visited friends on Palm Island and was shocked at the restrictions the Aboriginal people living there were forced to endure. He recorded their lives and stories in his first book, "This is Palm Island". In the 1980s, Rosser went back to Palm Island and this book is an account of his experiences and the changes he saw in both the people and the place.