Download Free A Biography Of The Australian Continent Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Biography Of The Australian Continent and write the review.

The ancestors of the Aboriginal people arrived on the coast of Sahul, the continent comprised of Tasmania, the mainland of present day Australia. Also, New Guinea sometime earlier than 50,000 years ago, so their culture is among the oldest, and probably the oldest, culture in the world.
People would have known about Australia before they saw it. Smoke billowing above the sea spoke of a land that lay beyond the horizon. A dense cloud of migrating birds may have pointed the way. But the first Australians were voyaging into the unknown. Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent. Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia. It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging. It is about a slow shift in national consciousness: the deep time dreaming that has changed the way many of us relate to this continent and its enduring, dynamic human history. John Mulvaney Book Award: Winner Ernest Scott Prize: Winner NSW Premier's Literary Awards: Winner - Book of the Year NSW Premier's Literary Awards: Winner - Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: Highly Commended Queensland Literary Awards: Shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards: Shortlisted Educational Publishing Awards: Shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards: Longlisted CHASS Book Prize: Longlisted ‘What a revelatory work! If you wish to hear the voice of our continent's history before the written word, Deep Time Dreaming is a must read. The freshest, most important book about our past in years.’ —Tim Flannery ‘Once every generation a book comes along that marks the emergence of a powerful new literary voice and shifts our understanding of the nation’s past. Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming is one such book. Deeply researched, creatively conceived and beautifully written, it charts the expansion of archaeological knowledge in Australia for the first time. No other book has managed to convey the mystery and intricacy of Indigenous antiquity in quite the same way. Read it: it will change the way you see Australian history.’ —Mark McKenna, historian ‘Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia is a remarkable book, and one destined, I believe, to become a modern classic of Australian history writing. Written in vivid, evocative prose, this book will grip both the expert and the general reader alike.’ —Iain McCalman, author of The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change
Australia celebrates 100 years as a nation in 2001. This book - part history, part travelogue, part memoir - tells the inspiring story of how a colony with only two sorts of citizens, convicts and gaolers, became a confident modern country.
The Story of Australia provides a fresh, engaging and comprehensive introduction to Australia’s history and geography. An island continent with distinct physical features, Australia is home to the most enduring Indigenous cultures on the planet. In the late eighteenth century newcomers from distant worlds brought great change. Since that time, Australia has been shaped by many peoples with competing visions of what the future might hold. This new history of Australia integrates a rich body of scholarship from many disciplines, drawing upon maps, novels, poetry, art, music, diaries and letters, government and scientific reports, newspapers, architecture and the land itself, engaging with Australia in its historical, geographical, national and global contexts. It pays particular attention to women and Indigenous Australians, as well as exploring key themes including invasion/colonisation, land use, urbanisation, war, migration, suburbia and social movements for change. Elegantly written, readers will enjoy Australia’s story from its origins to the present as the nation seeks to resolve tensions between Indigenous dispossession, British tradition and multicultural diversity while finding its place in an Asian region and dealing with global challenges like climate change. It is an ideal text for students, academics and general readers with an interest in Australian history, geography, politics and culture.
Since the first sailing ships spied the Antarctic coastline in 1820, the frozen continent has captured the world's imagination. David Day's brilliant biography of Antarctica describes in fascinating detail every aspect of this vast land's history--two centuries of exploration, scientific investigation, and contentious geopolitics. Drawing from archives from around the world, Day provides a sweeping, large-scale history of Antarctica. Focusing on the dynamic personalities drawn to this unconquered land, the book offers an engaging collective biography of explorers and scientists battling the elements in the most hostile place on earth. We see intrepid sea captains picking their way past icebergs and pushing to the edge of the shifting pack ice, sanguinary sealers and whalers drawn south to exploit "the Penguin El Dorado," famed nineteenth-century explorers like Scott and Amundson in their highly publicized race to the South Pole, and aviators like Clarence Ellsworth and Richard Byrd, flying over great stretches of undiscovered land. Yet Antarctica is also the story of nations seeking to incorporate the Antarctic into their national narratives and to claim its frozen wastes as their own. As Day shows, in a place as remote as Antarctica, claiming land was not just about seeing a place for the first time, or raising a flag over it; it was about mapping and naming and, more generally, knowing its geographic and natural features. And ultimately, after a little-known decision by FDR to colonize Antarctica, claiming territory meant establishing full-time bases on the White Continent. The end of the Second World War would see one last scramble for polar territory, but the onset of the International Geophysical Year in 1957 would launch a cooperative effort to establish scientific bases across the continent. And with the Antarctic Treaty, science was in the ascendant, and cooperation rather than competition was the new watchword on the ice. Tracing history from the first sighting of land up to the present day, Antarctica is a fascinating exploration of this deeply alluring land and man's struggle to claim it.
The book explores how the indigenous people actually came to be in Australia, and looks in depth at their extraordinary rituals and ‘Dreamings’, and the importance of ‘kin’ to their social structures. Much space is devoted to their massive cultural renaissance over the past four decades, with comprehensive coverage of the way in which Aboriginal art - be it Central Desert acrylic art, batik, contemporary urban painting, sculpture or traditional bark painting - has become a flagship for Australian culture.
The Australian Continent: A Geophysical Synthesis is designed to provide a summary of the character of the Australian continent through the extensive information available at the continental scale, as a contribution to the understanding of Australia's lithospheric architecture and its evolution. The results build on the extensive databases assembled at Geoscience Australia, particularly for potential fields, supplemented by the full range of seismological information, mostly from The Australian National University. To aid in cross comparison of results from different disciplines, information is presented with a common projection and scales.
'I love history because it is story, but the very best thing about this story is that it is not finished. All of us are making history every moment of our lives.' Nadia Wheatley Australians All encompasses the history of our continent from the Ice Age to the Apology, from the arrival of the First Fleet to the Mabo Judgement. Brief accounts of the lives of real young Australians open up this chronological narrative. Some of the subjects of the eighty mini-biographies have become nationally or even internationally famous. Others were legends in their own families and communities. Meticulously researched, beautifully written and highly readable, Australians All helps us understand who we are, and how we belong to the land we all share. It also shows us who we might be. 'In Australian histories there is a particular group whose tales and presence and concerns are rarely narrated. These are the children and adolescents. They are depicted as mute sufferers of the decisions of elders (as were the children of the Depression), helpless victims of policy (the Stolen Generations) and the children of the Second World War (of whom I was one). They appear in most writing of history as mere passive accessories to what adults do. But their stories are our stories too, and their stories are our history, and Nadia Wheatley, that great writer, tells that wide-ranging story in a way so imaginative and colourful that it would attract any young person, and make young readers feel that many of their personal struggles have been faced before, by children of the past and present. Nadia has performed an essential service to history and the young.' - Thomas Keneally
The daughter of a wealthy Australian landowner, Alix defies convention to train as a nurse on the rugged Queensland outback, where her daughter becomes a pilot in the flying doctor service on the eve of World War II
First Footprints tells the extraordinary story of the Aboriginal people of Australia. How they made their way out of Africa 60,000 years ago, and how they survived across this vast continent, from the harsh deserts of the inland to the glaciers of southern Tasmania. With photos from the ABC TV series of the same name. Some 60,000 years ago, a small group of people landed on Australia's northern coast. They were the first oceanic mariners and this great southern land was their new home. Gigantic mammals roamed the plains and enormous crocodiles, giant snakes and goannas nestled in the estuaries and savannahs. First Footprints tells the epic story of Australia's Aboriginal people. It is a story of ancient life on the driest continent on earth through the greatest environmental changes experienced in human history: ice ages, extreme drought and inundating seas. It is chronicled through astonishing archaeological discoveries, ancient oral histories and the largest and oldest art galleries on earth. Australia's first inhabitants were the first people to believe in an afterlife, cremate their dead, engrave representations of the human face, and depict human sound and emotion. They created new technologies, designed ornamentation, engaged in trade, and crafted the earliest documents of war. Ultimately, they developed a sustainable society based on shared religious tradition and far-reaching social networks across the length and breadth of Australia.