The Australian People

Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse societies in the world today. From its ancient indigenous origins to British colonisation followed by waves of European then international migration in the twentieth century, the island continent is home to people from all over the globe. Each new wave of settlers has had a profound impact on Australian society and culture. The Australian People documents the dramatic history of Australian settlement and describes the rich ethnic and cultural inheritance of the nation through the contributions of its people. It is one of the largest reference works of its kind, with approximately 250 expert contributors and almost one million words. Illustrated in colour and black and white, the book is both a comprehensive encyclopedia and a survey of the controversial debates about citizenship and multiculturalism now that Australia has attained the centenary of its federation.

Aborigines and Europeans - Convicts - Squatters and selectors - Immigration - Education - Gold discoveries - The Chinese on the goldfields - Caroline Chisolm - The Communist Party of Australia - IWW and strikes - Catholic Social Movement - Clubs, gentlemen's - Economic depression - Free Trade or protectionism - Freemasonry - Labour Party - Mechanics' Institutes - Archbishop Mannix - Roman Catholic Church, its growth, and influence on politics and education - Shearer's Strike - Trade unions - Sport for the people.

A history of the development of Australia since the first white settlement of 1788.

Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing - behaviors inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.

The Indigenous peoples of Australia have a proud history of participation and the achievement of excellence in Australian sports. Historically, Australian sports have provided a rare and important social context in which Indigenous Australians could engage with and participate in non-Indigenous society. Today, Indigenous Australian people in sports continue to provide important points of reference around which national public dialogue about racial and cultural relations in Australia takes place. Yet much media coverage surrounding these issues and almost all academic interest concerning Indigenous people and Australian sports is constructed from non-Indigenous perspectives. With a few notable exceptions, the racial and cultural implications of Australian sports as viewed from an Indigenous Australian Studies perspective remains understudied. The media coverage and academic discussion of Indigenous people and Australian sports is largely constructed within the context of Anglo-Australian nationalist discourse, and becomes most emphasised when reporting on aspects of ‘racial and cultural’ explanations of Indigenous sporting excellence and failures associated anomalous behaviour. This book investigates the many ways that Indigenous Australians have engaged with Australian sports and the racial and cultural readings that have been associated with these engagements. Questions concerning the importance that sports play in constructions of Australian indigeneities and the extent to which these have been maintained as marginal to Australian national identity are the central critical themes of this book. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

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. Winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Australian History 2021 Winner of the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize 2021 Co-winner of the Ernest Scott Prize for History 2021 'A masterpiece of historical writing that takes your breath away' - Tom Griffiths 'A majestic book' - John Maynard 'Shimmering prose' - Tiffany Shellam Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, is where the two early Australias - ancient and modern - first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots. The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain's felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, a community that nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life. The Aboriginal people had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years. Their history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from this river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin's Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today. The Hawkesbury-Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.