Important Works

A Murri mother and her daughter tell the story of Aunty Lesley's childhood under the Act at Cherbourg, her years of domestic labour for stolen wages, and her long public campaign for justice. It won the David Unaipon Award, and Aunty Lesley has spoken at these very Mitchelton sessions, so the voice in these pages is one this community has heard in the room. If the lists begin anywhere, they begin here.

The Charter quotes her poem "The Past" for good reason. Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal, of Minjerribah just across the bay, gave this country its first widely read Aboriginal poetry collection, and the poems run from protest to tenderness in language nobody needs a footnote to feel.

A Goorie novelist from Brisbane won the Miles Franklin Award with this fierce, funny novel of a Bundjalung family fighting for their river country. Fiction, and utterly local truth-telling: the humour the Charter promises alongside the hard history.

The same Goorie novelist as Too Much Lip, now writing Brisbane itself. Two stories five generations apart: Mulanyin and Nita in the 1850s, when the saltwater people still outnumbered the British and the town was called Edenglassie, and Granny Eddie in the present, telling a white journalist that the version of this history he was taught is wrong. Winner of the ARA Historical Novel Prize and a Victorian Premier's Literary Award. For a Brisbane audience this is the essential novel on the list: the streets in it are the ones outside the library door.

The Wiradjuri journalist's reckoning with growing up Aboriginal in Australia, written after his viral speech on racism and the Australian Dream. Direct, personal, and written for exactly the reader who says "I never knew."

The beloved Gunditjmara and Bundjalung singer was taken from his family at two years old. His memoir travels the whole arc, removal, homelessness, music, and healing, with the generosity that made "Took the Children Away" a national hymn.

The Martu author tells her own mother's story: three girls who escaped a removal settlement and walked 1,600 kilometres home along the fence. A short book, and one of the most widely shared accounts of the Stolen Generations ever written.

Winner of the David Unaipon Award, this is close to the memoir to which Not Just Black and White replies: a four-year-old girl's whole childhood inside the dormitory system at Cherbourg, and the domestic service that followed it. Read the two together and one Cherbourg story becomes two, which is closer to the truth. A sequel, Bittersweet Journey, follows Ruth's life after the Mission.

Fifty First Nations voices, from Elders to teenagers, each answering the same question in a few pages. Ideal for a reader unsure where to start, or for reading one story a night; the range itself is the lesson.

The Yiman and Bidjara scholar's plain-language guide to First Nations Australia: history, kinship, native title, art, and protocol, organised region by region. The reference book for the questions people hesitate to ask aloud.

A Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander author travelled the country with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, gathering the voices behind it. The referendum did not end the Statement's invitation, and this book explains it from the inside.

Written for the referendum itself, in plain, patient language, by the same Torres Strait Islander advocate and the veteran journalist who has covered Indigenous affairs for decades. The 2023 vote did not go the way its authors hoped; the book remains the clearest record of what was actually being asked, and why, for readers still working through that question.

An Apalech man's exhilarating tour of Indigenous knowledge systems, argued through yarns, carvings, and pattern-thinking. The book on this list most likely to rearrange how a professional reader thinks about thinking.

A Tagalaka fire practitioner explains cultural burning: what the old people knew about caring for this continent with fire, and what it offers a country now burning the wrong way. Practical, hopeful, and increasingly influential.

A Wiradjuri novel built around a grandfather's dictionary of his language, each word opening a piece of family and colonial history. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, and the most moving argument in recent Australian writing for what language holds.

A Waanyi woman from the Gulf Country in Queensland's far north-west, Wright is the only Aboriginal author to win the Miles Franklin Award twice, first for Carpentaria in 2007 and again in 2024 for the seven-hundred-page Praiseworthy, which also won the Stella Prize the same year. Neither book is an easy read, and neither wants to be; both reward the reader who stays with them, in a voice unlike anything else in Australian fiction.

A Eualeyai and Kamillaroi lawyer and filmmaker sends an Aboriginal mother and her lawyer daughter on a literary tour of England, and lets the colonisers' literature and the family's own story illuminate each other. Warm, wry, and quietly devastating.

Synge spent three years recovering the names of the Aboriginal stockmen who bred the horses for the Queensland Police at Rewan Station on Bidjara Country, from 1909 until the government closed it and auctioned the horses in 1934. The state called its white workers constables and its Aboriginal workers trackers, and left their names almost unrecorded. She found them: Corporal Rob, Prince Albert, Boolboora-Leo Freeman, Jack Splinter, and the Woorabinda drovers. The final part turns on the officials in Brisbane's Treasury Building who ran the system. Synge spoke at Mitchelton, and this is the book on erasure as a method of government.

The definitive account of Dundalli, the Dalla lawman who led resistance across south-east Queensland for twelve years and was publicly hanged outside the Brisbane gaol in January 1855. Connors, a legal historian, reads the colonial record against itself to show that what settlers called outrages were the operation of Aboriginal law, and that the trial which killed him had no lawful basis. Winner of the Queensland Premier's Award for a work of State Significance and the Magarey Medal for Biography. The local frontier history, told properly.

The historian who did most to document the frontier wars addresses truth-telling directly: what the record shows, and what follows from it. A natural companion to the purpose of these sessions.

Marr discovered his own ancestors served in the Native Police, and wrote the history of Queensland's frontier through his family's part in it. For a Queensland audience, the book that shows what honest settler reckoning looks like.

Ten years in the state archives produced the first full account of the Native Police: mounted Aboriginal troopers under white officers who cleared the Queensland frontier through killing that had the government's implicit approval and, just as often, its concealment. David Marr's own ancestors served in this force; Richards' book is the wider history within which his family memoir sits.

A Cairns historian's systematic, place-by-place record of the massacres that accompanied Queensland's pastoral expansion, roughly 140 documented sites between 1831 and 1918, with conservative estimates of tens of thousands of Aboriginal deaths. Confronting precisely because it refuses to generalise: it names places, several within a few hours' drive of Mitchelton.

A meticulous account, from colonial records themselves, of how Aboriginal people managed this continent as a designed and cared-for estate. Read alongside Fire Country, and alongside the Dark Emu conversation below.

The bestseller that put Aboriginal agriculture and settlement into national conversation, and also drew sustained scholarly debate about its evidence and claims. Read it as the start of an argument rather than the end of one, and watch The Dark Emu Story in the viewing list, which airs the debate fairly from First Nations perspectives.