The Outback—so called because it is literally out the back of all major cities in Australia—has been the setting of many of Australia’s exported culturally defining stories and cinematography. Cattle stations or ranches in the Outback provide ample settings for tales to be dreamed up and shared through poem, song, and story. Two Years in Australia’s Wild West explores one man’s journey into this famed landscape. In this entertaining memoir, author, D. Alexander Steel shares the often harsh, and sometimes amusing, ways life can take us to unexpected but necessary places. Travel from Adelaide to the extreme and wild western edges of the Australian continent via sometimes humorous, sometimes serious vignettes. This book examines a young man’s coming of age and discusses the myriad ways God intervenes to help us grow into the people we’re meant to become. Through tales of brotherhood, family, and friends, be reminded that we each have a role in God’s grand design; it might just take a bit of wandering to find the way.
The Outback--so called because it is literally out the back of all major cities in Australia--has been the setting of many of Australia's exported culturally defining stories and cinematography. Cattle stations or ranches in the Outback provide ample settings for tales to be dreamed up and shared through poem, song, and story. Two Years in Australia's Wild West explores one man's journey into this famed landscape. In this entertaining memoir, author, D. Alexander Steel shares the often harsh, and sometimes amusing, ways life can take us to unexpected but necessary places. Travel from Adelaide to the extreme and wild western edges of the Australian continent via sometimes humorous, sometimes serious vignettes. This book examines a young man's coming of age and discusses the myriad ways God intervenes to help us grow into the people we're meant to become. Through tales of brotherhood, family, and friends, be reminded that we each have a role in God's grand design; it might just take a bit of wandering to find the way.
Despite the passage of time, our vision of Native Americans remains locked up within powerful stereotypes. That's why some images of Indians can be so unexpected and disorienting: What is Geronimo doing sitting in a Cadillac? Why is an Indian woman in beaded buckskin sitting under a salon hairdryer? Such images startle and challenge our outdated visions, even as the latter continue to dominate relations between Native and non-Native Americans. Philip Deloria explores this cultural discordance to show how stereotypes and Indian experiences have competed for ascendancy in the wake of the military conquest of Native America and the nation's subsequent embrace of Native "authenticity." Rewriting the story of the national encounter with modernity, Deloria provides revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected things-singing opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywood-in ways that suggest new directions for American Indian history. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--a time when, according to most standard American narratives, Indian people almost dropped out of history itself—Deloria argues that a great many Indians engaged the very same forces of modernization that were leading non-Indians to reevaluate their own understandings of themselves and their society. He examines longstanding stereotypes of Indians as invariably violent, suggesting that even as such views continued in American popular culture, they were also transformed by the violence at Wounded Knee. He tells how Indians came to represent themselves in Wild West shows and Hollywood films and also examines sports, music, and even Indian people's use of the automobile-an ironic counterpoint to today's highways teeming with Dakota pick-ups and Cherokee sport utility vehicles. Throughout, Deloria shows us anomalies that resist pigeonholing and force us to rethink familiar expectations. Whether considering the Hollywood films of James Young Deer or the Hall of Fame baseball career of pitcher Charles Albert Bender, he persuasively demonstrates that a significant number of Indian people engaged in modernity-and helped shape its anxieties and its textures-at the very moment they were being defined as "primitive." These "secret histories," Deloria suggests, compel us to reconsider our own current expectations about what Indian people should be, how they should act, and even what they should look like. More important, he shows how such seemingly harmless (even if unconscious) expectations contribute to the racism and injustice that still haunt the experience of many Native American people today.
“I pull on my balaclava and step onto the bridge wing. It’s loud outside: I can hear the rumbles of nine vessels’ engines and the hiss of ten water cannons … Suddenly the bridge is full of refugees from the upper deck. They are blocking my view out the back windows, but their faces – afraid, excited, awestruck – illustrate the looming presence of the Nisshin. I bend my knees and grip the bench, ready for the crunch.” In Blood and Guts, Sam Vincent plunges into the whale wars. Vincent sets sail with Sea Shepherd, led by the charismatic and abrasive Paul Watson. He attends the recent case at the International Court of Justice, which finds Japan’s ‘scientific’ whaling in the Southern Ocean to be unlawful. And he travels to Japan to investigate why its government doggedly continues to bankroll the unprofitable hunt. This is a fresh, funny and intelligent look at how Australia has become the most vocal anti-whaling nation on Earth. Vincent skewers hypocrisy and sheds light on motives, noble and otherwise. With Japan planning to relaunch its lethal program in 2015, the whale wars are set to continue. Blood and Guts is a riveting work of immersion journalism that lays bare the forces driving this conflict.
The following pages contain the results of the author's travels and residence in the western parts of Australia, between the years 1837 and 1840, during which period he traversed extensive regions unknown to the European traveler, and probably never before trodden by the foot of civilized man. It is not alone with gratification of enlightened curiosity that the countries now first brought to notice are likely to be objects of interest. A knowledge of the districts lying between Swan River and Shark Bay cannot but be of importance to future colonists, whilst the intertropical provinces of the north-west coasts, distinguished as they are by important peculiarities both of character and position, are equally calculated to draw the attention of the literary and enterprising enquirer.
Horses, friends, ragtime music, and steer roping-those were the interests of the youthful Will Rogers as he came of age in the Indian Territory and traveled to the Southern Hemisphere in this first of six definitive volumes of The Papers of Will Rogers. By separating fact from legend and unveiling new knowledge via extensive archival research, this documentary history represents a unique contribution to Rogers scholarship and to studies of the Cherokee Nation West. Using many previously unpublished letters and photographs-together with introductions, notes, and biographies of his friends and relatives-volume one illuminates Rogers’s complex relationship with his father, his Cherokee heritage, his early education, first encounters with his future wife, Betty Blake, his voyage to Argentina, and his fledging years in Wild West shows and circuses in South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Coorespondence, performance reviews, and rare newspaper documents spotlight the singular experiences that shaped the young Rogers within the context of his family, his ethnic background, and historical events. No other book describes so provocatively and authentically the genesis of America’s most beloved and influential humorist.
‘I wanted to showcase those subjects which thoughtful and talented Australian writers were absorbed by in this particular year; indeed (I thought), wouldn’t it be good to show what this country, and its culture, was about in 2010?’ —Robert Drewe This year’s Best Australian Essays offers riveting snapshots of the nation’s “current loves and angers, its art and myths and amusements and gender concerns – and its propensity for bushfires.” From Alex Miller on the creative imagination to Mark Dapin on crime myths, from Amanda Hooton on Miss Universe to Tim Flannery on the inner lives of animals, this is a collection that takes the pulse of the nation’s writers and thinkers and finds them in rude health. A deeply satisfying collection for that long summer read. Contributors include: Clive James, Christine Kenneally, Shane Maloney, David Marr, Mark Dapin, Andrew Sant, Guy Rundle, Peter Conrad, Jo Lennan, Tim Flannery, Maureen O’Shaughnessy, Ian Henderson, Amanda Hooton, Anne Manne, Elizabeth Farrelly, David Brooks, Sunil Badami, Les Murray, Janet Hawley, David Malouf, Shelley Gare, Paul McGeough, Murray Bail, Kathy Marks, Alex Miller, Melissa Lucashenko, Lorna Hallahan, Pauline Nguyen, Carmel Bird, Nicolas Rothwell, Robert Manne, Sarah Drummond and Gerard Windsor. ‘A rich anthology’ —Canberra Times ‘A rich and varied collection’ —Sydney Morning Herald ‘Wonderful’ —the Age ‘A terrific collection’ —Big Issue ‘The perfect summer volume’ —Adelaide Review Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne and grew up on the West Australian coast. His many novels and short stories and his prize-winning memoir, The Shark Net, have been widely translated, won national and international awards, and been adapted for film, television, radio and theatre around the world. He has also edited five collections of short stories and prose, including The Best Australian Stories 2006 and The Best Australian Stories 2007.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people's mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures.
The Oxford Children's Book of Famous People is a one-stop guide to the people who matter. This stylish and information-packed book tells the stories of 1000 women and men whose lives have influenced the course of history. Learn about the famous and the infamous - leaders from Genghis Khan toTony Blair; scientists and thinkers from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking; personalities from Rasputin to Michael Jordan. The text is organized alphabetically for easy reference, but there are also chronological and thematic directories linking people in time and by area of achievement. In this newedition the entries have been updated, and there are new biographies of such figures as George W Bush, J K Rowling, Julia Roberts and Steve Redgrave.
This book sets out the evidence to answer to this question and outlines its development and spread from one side of the continent to the other. It’s an amazing and quintessentially Australian story, one of the many stories from Australia’s ‘hidden history’. It will be of great interest to all the men and women who have used the technique, to those who are now attending bronco branding competitions, to any who have wondered at an old bronco panel or a faded photograph of broncoing in action, and to all who are fascinated by Australian history.
