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By Alexis Wright
"When “Carpentaria,” Alexis Wright’s epic novel about Aboriginal life, appeared last year, readers in Australia were slow to warm to its magisterial yet colloquial voice, which transformed the oral tradition of the country’s indigenous people into a swirling narrative spiked with burlesque humor and featuring a huge cast of eccentric characters."
Source: Aboriginal Lit - The New York Times"This is epic, biblical stuff. The serpent creates "mighty bending rivers" across what is now northern Australia. It "spurns human endeavour in one dramatic gesture". The port town of Desperance, built in colonial triumph, is stranded when the river suddenly changes course. Human enterprise stands for nothing amid these vast and ancient natural forces. That's a given in the Aboriginal Law handed down through the ages, but to the whitefellas of Uptown, and to modern British readers, it all comes as a bit of a shock."
Source: Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright- Independent UK
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Books available from the publishers publishing houses Indigenous media If you would like a book featured on this page - that is relevent to Europeans - please email info@eniar.org
Previous book featuresGuerriers pour la paix : La condition politique des Aborigènes vue de Palm Island, Montpellier, Indigène Editions (col. « Indigène esprit »), 2008By Barbara Glowczewski avec une contribution de Lex Wotton
«En Australie, les effets cumulés sur deux siècles du choc colonial, de l’injustice sociale et du racisme quotidien ont produit statistiquement et émotionnellement l’équivalent d’un désastre de guerre sur les Aborigènes », écrit Barbara Glowczewski. Ici, l’anthropologue fouille dans le désastre à la manière d’un Truman Capote, auscultant la mort brutale, pendant une garde à vue en 2004, de Mulrunji, un Aborigène de Palm Island, ancienne réserve au large de Townsville, dans le Queensland. Cette fois, les Aborigènes et notamment Lex Wotton qui a apporté sa contribution au livre, se sont dressés pour la justice sociale et la paix. Le policier au coeur du drame, grâce à une longue campagne et deux années d’enquête, a été déclaré responsable de cette mort. Mais, au terme des événements que Barbara Glowczewski reconstitue, témoignage après témoignage, image vidéo après image, le policier sera finalement relaxé par un jury entièrement blanc. Lex Wotton, pour avoir participé au mouvement d’indignation, risque, lui, la prison a vie...
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The Grand Experiment  |
By Anouk Ride
Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia)
Longlisted for the Vogel Literary Awards.
'Two boys travel three continents to follow one monk's dream, in this untold story from Australia's colonial history.
In 1848, the Spanish missionary Rosendo Salvado, founder of New Norcia Monastery in Western Australia, had an idea. He would prove that Aboriginal people could be educated and 'civilised', by taking two Nyungar boys to be schooled in Europe.
And so it was that Conaci, aged seven, and Dirimera, aged ten, left their tribe to travel by sea to the racially-divided colony of South Africa, Ireland at the beginning of their nationalist uprising, the United Kingdom in the midst of its industrial revolution, France ravaged by civil war and finally entered a monastery in Naples.
The Grand Experiment is a remarkable - and timely - book. It is a colourful detective story of research through libraries and archives across the world, and very much a beginning of the 'stolen generations' story'. Source: anoukride.com
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By Alec Kruger and Gerard Waterford
Winner of the 2007 Human Rights Arts Non-Fiction Award
'In the late 1920s Alec Kruger was stolen from his family and country into the institutions of Kahlin, Pine Creek and the Bungalow in Alice Springs. From there he was taken again, to the cattle stations of Central Australia, where he was expected to display all the independence and ingenuity of someone much older. In isolation, Alec faced possible death, until the arrival of Old People from country saved him, taught him and culturally made him strong. Alec spent years droving and roaming throughout the Territory and Queensland, finally finding a sense of belonging and somewhere to call home through having his own family and with the emergence of groups such as the Central Australian Stolen Generations and Families Aboriginal Corporation engaged in the struggle for recognition, reconciliation and recompense. Alec was in the vanguard of claimants who first took their need for recognition to the High Court, testing the legality of the assimilation legislation that allowed authorities to forcibly remove Aboriginal children from their families throughout the 20th century.'
Source: IAD Media Release
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