Richard Broome Livres

Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity – as well as the vagaries of international markets – and became some of Australia’s most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure.Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.

Explores Australia's history through the lens of the original Australians, highlighting their losses during the colonial era as white settlers displaced them across coasts and deserts through population growth, disease, technology, and violence.

My late twenties have felt like a series of slow-motion epiphanies, each one sneaking up before slapping me in my newly acquired jowls. Everything I said I'd do 'by the time I'm thirty' as a glassy-eyed graduate is now in the 'by the time I'm forty' box.Much has been made of delayed adulthood of Gen Y'ers - that they flit from job to job and take their sweet time earning the traditional adult badges: marriage, children, a mortgage. But what makes this generation tick?In We're All Going to Die (Especially Me), award-winning journalist Joel Meares reflects on the muddle of Gen Y existence with razor-sharp insight and riotous good humour. From 'My hands are pretty, and little' and 'I can't handle my drugs' to 'I am not a New Yorker' and 'I make an excellent bridesmaid', Meares' essays are self-deprecating, confessional and rollicking good fun.For lovers of David Sedaris and Benjamin Law.'We're All Going to Dieis like a series of late-night conversations with someone so smart, perceptive and wry, you're already secretly planning to make them be your new best friend.' - Benjamin Law.

In the creation of a new society there are always winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew through invasion, settlement and development from a colonial outpost to an affluent industrial society. This book tells the history of Australia from the perspective of those who were dispossessed, the original Australians. Australian history is often recounted as a saga of progress by a developing white nation towards a bigger and better target; this text examines this process from the opposite angle. It reveals what White Australia lost by its onslaught on Aboriginal culture and how Aborigines, in different ways, have attempted to maintain their distinctive identity in the face of hostility, ignorance and exploitation.

The story of a non-Aboriginal man who crossed over into the Aboriginal world, Alick Jackomos became fully immersed in Aboriginal welfare work and activism for Aboriginal rights. His life is set in the context of evolving Aboriginal activism, yet there were moments of controversy as he was a non-Aboriginal man, with an Aboriginal family, living and moving in an Aboriginal world and working for Aboriginal causes.

Visier Meyasetsu Sanyu, his family and fellow villagers of Khonoma, fled for their lives to the jungles of Nagaland in 1956. He and his family survived privations and starvation for over two years, though many others did not. Visier emerged from the jungle aged eight and into a turbulent world altered by Western influence, civil war, and colonial oppression. He found refuge from war in Australia, where during two decades he faced the loss of home and tradition, and found healing and a second home. This powerful story tracks Visier's fascinating journey from indigenous religion to Christianity, from village school to a professorship, and from small town life to appearances before the United Nations. His kaleidoscopic sixty-year odyssey to find peace, tranquillity, and forgiveness for others, is vividly told