Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: Michelle Humphries
Unabridged: 2 hr 47 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 03/17/2023
A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. However, the first human footprints on this vast territory were felt 70,000 years earlier, as people began to cross the periodic land bridges and the short sea crossings from Southeast Asia.
The history of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, known in contemporary anthropology as the “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia,” is a complex and continually evolving field of study, and it has been colored by politics. For generations after the arrival of whites in Australia, the Aboriginal people were disregarded and marginalized, largely because they offered little in the way of a labor resource, and they occupied land required for European settlement.
At the same time, it is a misconception that indigenous Australians meekly accepted the invasion of their country by the British, for they did not. They certainly resisted, but as far as colonial wars during that era went, the frontier conflicts of Australia did not warrant a great deal of attention. Indigenous Australians were hardly a warlike people, and without central organization, or political cohesion beyond scattered family groups, they succumbed to the orchestrated advance of white settlement with passionate, but futile resistance. In many instances, aggressive clashes between the two groups simply gave the white colonists reasonable cause to inflict a style of genocide on the Aborigines that stood in the way of progress.
The magnificent monolith the locals call “Uluru,” situated in the heart of Australia, hovers over a patchy bed of desert poplars and spinifex grasslands. The pleasant, but otherwise unexceptional surroundings of the spellbinding sandsto...
Marikoriko, the first woman, and Tiki, her Creator.Hupene, the old Tohunga, squats muttering on the floor beside his carved ancestor Tiki.Tiki is a God who in the dim long ago helped to build the world, and the whose carved image is now supporting t...
The Birdsville Track runs through three deserts, from Marree in northern South Australia, to Birdsville in outback Queensland. This legendary, dirt road has a rich folk history, intriguing culture and unique ecosystems. But it doesn't give up its se...
The Jerilderie Letter By Ned Kelly Narrated by Denis Daly Edward "Ned" Kelly (1854 -1880) was the last and most celebrated Australian bushranger (outlaw). After being implicated in the shooting of three policemen ...
In the summer of 1839, 26-year-old Louisa Anne Meredith, in the company of her husband, Charles Meredith, sailed from England to the British colony of New South Wales, in what was then New Holland. Four years later, she published a detailed...
Although Australia was actually colonized by the forced dispossession of the indigenous Aboriginals, the Commonwealth of Australia came about by the free federation of six self-governing British colonies in 1901, which makes it one of just a handfu...
Robert O'Hara Burke (1821-1861) was one of the great Victorian explorers. In 1860 he was appointed to lead the Victorian Exploring Expedition, which aimed to cross the Australian continent from south to north. The expedition left Melbourne on Monday...
Once the sacred guardian of New Zealand’s native forests, the huia was a symbol of the land’s unique beauty and spirituality. The rare bird’s tragic extinction in the early 1900s represents a shot to the heart of Aotearoa (New Zeal...
On the 25th August 1895, Ernest Alfred Hall was born into a pioneering Australian family that lived on a 313-acre property called 'Cloverdale' near the hamlet of Beech Forest, south of the Otway Ranges, some 200 kilometres south west of Me...