ONTD Reading Challenge Around the World: November/Australia
Hey guys!!! Our reading challenge is ALMOST OVER, so don't give up now! For November, we will be exploring the literary lands of Australia, guided by our very own winter_lace, who wrote this month's post for us!
- Australia is the largest country located with the continent of Oceania and is both the oldest and driest country in the world. The majority of the population makes its home on the coast, in particular the east coast in the cities of Melbourne (Victoria), Sydney (New South Wales) and Brisbane (Queensland).
- The Indigenous/First Nations peoples of Australia have the oldest continuous living culture of any people in the world with at least 65,000 years of history (evidence estimates place it between 80,000 to 125,000 years). At the time of colonisation there was over 250+ unique groups and languages, many of which have now been lost.
- While Captain James Cook is often the explorer most associated with Australia, he was not the first European to encounter the land. Dutch navigator Willem Janzoon was the first documented European encounter in the early 17th century and the country was known as New Holland until James Cook mapped the east coast in 1770 and claimed the land for the British Empire, renaming it New South Wales. British navigator Matthew Flinders was the first person to suggest the name Australia and that name was officially adopted in 1824.
- Federation of the six British self governing colonies occurred on the 1st of January 1901 to become the commonwealth of Australia. One of the first acts of legislation for the federated country was to restrict immigration as well as various policies that would be come to be known as the White Australia policy. The policy had legs long before federation with restrictions and taxes placed on Chinese miners during the Gold Rush (1851 on) period. The dismantling of the policy started at the conclusion of the Second World War to encourage non-British immigration (mostly Greeks, Italians and Yugoslavians) under the guise of "Populate or perish" and lingering fear over an Asian invasion from the war but it wouldn't be until the Holt government in 1966, nearly two decades later, that the policy would be completely dismantled.
- Colonisation had a horrific effect on the original custodians of Australia. The frontier wars, European diseases and massacres decimated the population. It is estimated that around 311 massacres occurred over 140 years with thousands of Indigenous peoples killed, though no definitive records were kept sites of these massacres were often marked by the names they came to be known by such as Murdering Gully in Newcastle.
- Conditions for Indigenous people varied from state to state, often forcibly relocated to missions or working for low wages and/or rations. Children were regularly taken by the state to be raised separately from family as to further encourage a decline of culture, connection and language. These children were known as the Stolen Generations and this practice occurred from approx 1905 - 1970. Even though there were efforts to bar them from serving, over a thousand Indigenous Australians fought for Australia in World War One. When they returned they were not recognised and not offered soldier settlements like their white counterparts. Similar happened during World War 2.
- Much like the United States, the 1960s were a time of social upheaval for Australia. In 1962 the Commonwealth gave Indigenous peoples the right to vote in federal elections. In 1965 a Freedom Ride organised by Sydney University students occurred to help raise awareness of Aboriginal health and living conditions and highlight social discrimination. In 1966 Vincent Lingiari led a strike to protest poor pay and working conditions on a station, which would be immortalised in the song “From Little Things Big Things Grow” by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody. But it wouldn't be until the late 90s that Queensland would instate a scheme to repay stolen wages of aboriginal workers and there is currently a class action in Western Australia for the same.
- In 1985 the government returned Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock, a large sandstone rock formation in the centre-ish of Australia, listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, and famous for it's colours changing with the sky) to the Anangu to whom it is sacred. However it would take until 2019 that climbing the rock would be banned. And it wouldn't be until 1992 that the High Court would overturn the legal concept of terra nullius in the groundbreaking Mabo case that would confirm the existence of native title in Australia.
- Australia has some of the most unique flora and fauna to be found in the world, mostly due to it's relative isolation, but it also has one of the highest extinct rates in the modern world. Destruction of habitat as well as climate change is threatening even to some the iconic residents ie Koalas. The Daintree Rainforest located on the north east coast of Queensland is one of the oldest continuous rainforests in the world with an extremely high rate of endemic species.
My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
The fierce, irreverent novel of aspiration and rebellion that is both a cornerstone of Australian literature and a feminist classic.
Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant Career when she was only sixteen, intending it to be the Australian answer to Jane Eyre. But the book she produced-a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about a young girl hungering for life and love in the outback-so scandalized her country upon its appearance in 1901 that she insisted it not be published again until ten years after her death.
The White Girl by Tony Birch
Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families. When a new policeman arrives in town, determined to enforce the law, Odette must risk everything to save Sissy and protect everything she loves.
In The White Girl, Miles-Franklin-shortlisted author Tony Birch shines a spotlight on the 1960s and the devastating government policy of taking Indigenous children from their families.
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool-a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime-it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption?
The Yield by Tara June Winch
Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind.
August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land - a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.
Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity.
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in an abandoned property in the middle of a desert in a story of two friends, sisterly love and courage - a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted.
Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue - but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in London's slums, William Thornhill is transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. But freedom can be bought, and when Thornhill claims a patch of land by the Hawkesbury River, the battle lines between the old and new inhabitants are drawn.
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred.
Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.
They never returned.
NON-FICTION
No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani
In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.
Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture by Bruce Pascoe
History has portrayed Australia’s First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.
In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.
Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia’s past is required - for the benefit of us all.
Dark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.
The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke
'Against anything I had ever been told was possible, I was turning white. On the surface of my skin, a miracle was quietly brewing . . .'
Suburban Australia. Sweltering heat. Three bedroom blonde-brick. Family of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke's life is just like all the other Aussie kids on her street.
Except for this one, glaring, inescapably obvious thing.
OTHER RECS
> The Swan Book by Alexis Wright (Dystopia Indigenous Fiction)(Alexis Wright also has quite a few other titles)
> Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko (Indigenous Fiction)
> Born Again Blakfella by Jack Charles (Indigenous Memoir)
> White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad (Non Fiction Ruby Hamad is a Syrian/Lebanese Journalist)
> It’s Been A Pleasure, Noni Blake by Claire Christian (Queer Romance)
> Bruny by Heather Rose (Speculative Political Thriller)
> Juliet Marillier, Liane Moriarty, Graeme Simsion, Kate Morton, Hannah Kent
sources: write-up by winter_lace
goodreads sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
what's your pick for this month, ONTD?