"Well, there’s so much to read, and I’m so far behind." Wallace Stegner
Eddie Blanket was falling, falling, falling towards the good Yagara earth. A calamity. At her great age, a fall meant the end, simple as that. Broken hip, pneumonia, kaput. I have been agonising over my book response for Edenglassie for too long now. With the Christmas season fast approaching though, I need to get it … Continue reading Edenglassie | Melissa Lucashenko
Our Gudanji kujiga grew here with Gudanji Country about the same time as our stories, and it was long before paper and words learned to yarn together. I don't know how our mob knew about souls, just that they did, because our stories and our kujiga live inside each other, as well as out there … Continue reading We Come With This Place | Debra Dank
In offering this little tract to the public it is equally the writer's wish to conduce to their amusement and information. The expedition on which he is engaged has excited much curiosity and given birth to many speculations respecting the consequences to arise from it. While men continue to think freely, they will judge variously. … Continue reading 1788 | Watkin Tench
Everything You Need to Know about the Voice, written by co-author of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Cobble Cobble woman Megan Davis, and fellow constitutional expert George Williams, is essential reading on the Voice to parliament and government, how our Constitution was drafted, what the 1967 referendum achieved, what it left unfinished and the … Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About the Voice | Megan Davis & George Williams
Come on a journey with us. Step lightly, carefully. Let's walk through the oldest, biggest library of knowledge on Earth. Many of my regular readers will already be aware of the First Knowledges series being published by Thames & Hudson in Australia. Originally designed to be a six book series (I believe it will now … Continue reading Songlines: First Knowledges for Young Readers | Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly
Gadalung marool season, the hot time. Wangal country. The premise of Jane Harrison's The Visitors is straightforward. It is the morning of 26th January 1788 and the First Fleet sails into Sydney Harbour. Except this story is not another white colonial or convict story (of which there are hundreds). This is the story of the … Continue reading The Visitors | Jane Harrison
This book was written in the year that was 2020. Best remembered for Covid-19 and a renewed Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of African-American man George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The year 2020 was also the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's voyage along the east coast of so-called … Continue reading Another Day in the Colony | Chelsea Watego
Me, Antman and our mongrel, Fleabag, like partyin outside. We both come from the bush. Me, I'm a NSW desert girl and Antman's mob are river people. Cos we aint got no river or desert here in the city, we like sittin in the park yarnin, having a charge, playin country music. We don't cause … Continue reading Me, Antman & Fleabag | Gayle Kennedy
Jazz Money is a poet and artist of Wiradjuri heritage, currently based on sovereign Gadigal land. Her debut collection of poetry, how to make a basket, was described by the judges of the David Unaipon Award as 'luminous and beautifully sculpted, [a] seamless collection of poems that reflect on place and passion...[and] builds on the … Continue reading how to make a basket | Jazz Money #poetry
This incredible book is a testament to the renaissance of First Nations poetry happening in Australia right now. UQP website Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today is an anthology of poems and essays from many well-known and emerging First Nations writers and thinkers. It is powerful and confronting stuff. It is very contemporary, … Continue reading Fire Front | edited by Alison Whittaker #poetry
According to wikipedia a drop bear is a fictional creature, an urban myth, designed by Australians to scare tourists. It has even been given a fictional scientific name - Thylarctos plummetus. According to folklore it looks like "a predatory, carnivorous version of the koala" and lives in gumtrees, dropping onto the heads of unsuspecting bushwalkers. … Continue reading Dropbear | Evelyn Araluen #AWWpoetry
In her Preface, Louise Crisp describes her collection of poetry, Yuiquimbiang as an 'ecopoetic form that integrates political essay and environmental poetics: a project that evolved out of my double life as a poet and environmental activist'. The regions she writes about the East Gippsland and the Monaro. Crisp's poems and texts evolve from her … Continue reading Yuiquimbiang | Louise Crisp #PoetryMonth
In 1930 the woman who called herself Mrs Hill caught the Old Trans across the Nullarbor. She sat with a notebook propped on her knees, her suitcase, typewriter and thin swag slung in the rack overhead, revelling in the train's front-stall view of the weird and mournful wilderness all around. Sometimes books come into your … Continue reading Into the Loneliness | Eleanor Hogan #AWWbiography
All I can remember, and this is what I told the police over and over again, is that there was a party at the house and I'd been drinking. It took me several weeks to read Benang in preparation for Indigenous Literature Week. It was intense, demanding and confronting. I'm very grateful to have finally … Continue reading After Story | Larissa Behrendt
2021 National NAIDOC logo The 4th - 11th July, 2021 is NAIDOC week. Lisa @ANZLitLovers hosts an Indigenous Literature Week to coincide with NAIDOC week. Lisa is careful to acknowledge that as 'a non-Indigenous Australian, I am mindful that I do not and cannot know or understand all aspects of Indigenous Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and … Continue reading Naidoc Week & Indigenous Picture Books
This Reading Life 