Broken Dreams (9 page)

This is the first collection to span the diverse range of Black Australian writings.

Thirty-six Aboriginal and Islander authors have contributed, including David Unaipon, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Gerry Bostock, Ruby Langford, Robert Bropho, Jack Davis, Hyllus Maris, William Ferguson, Sally Morgan, Mudrooroo Narogin and Archie Weller. Many more are represented through community writings such as petitions and letters.

Collected over six years from all the states and territories of Australia,
Paperbark
ranges widely across time and genre—from the 1840s to the present, from transcriptions of oral literature to rock opera. Prose, poetry, song, drama and polemic are accompanied by the selected artworks of Jimmy Pike, and an extensive bibliography.

The voices of Black Australia speak with passion and power in this challenging and important anthology.

Highly Commended—1990 Australian Human Rights Awards

Graeme Dixon's ballads speak out on contemporary and controversial issues, from Black deaths in custody to the struggles of single mothers. Contrasted with these are poems of spirited humour and sharp satire.

In
Holocaust Island
a powerful new voice emerges from a history of displacement.

Winner—1989 David Unaipon Award

This personal journey is also a landmark history of political struggle and achievement in the area of human rights.

From his involvement with the trade union movement of the 1930s through to the black rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, Joe McGinness has often been labelled a troublemaker.

The son of an Irish migrant and an Aboriginal woman of the Paperbark People of the Northern Territory, he was raised with an unusual outlook on life.

This memoir opens with his idyllic childhood on the family's isolated tin mine, learning Irish lore from his father, Stephen McGinness, and bush survival from his mother, Alyandabu. When his father dies, Joe McGinness begins to discover what it means to be Aboriginal in white Australia: the family is placed under the protection of a vast and ignorant white bureaucracy; the tin mine claim is forfeited; and Joe, his mother and brother are incarcerated in a compound in Darwin.

Entering the political fight for equality, the adult Joe McGinness effectively used the law to change the law. What had seemed most unyielding and unjust also had the power within it for radical change without violence.

Highly Commended—1989 David Unaipon Award

This fictional account of one woman's journey to recover her family and heritage won the 1990 David Unaipon Award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers. Set in the towns, pastoral stations and repressive institutions of Western Australia, it is a moving story of three generations of Yamatji women.

Kate begins her journey with the life of her grandmother, Lucy, a domestic servant. She discovers how her mother's love for a young Aboriginal stockman ended tragically.

Kate was born into the Settlement, taught Christian doctrine and trained for a career as a domestic. Gradually and painfully she sheds this narrowly prescribed identity, setting out on the pilgrimage home.

Winner—1990 David Unaipon Award

Well-known poet, playwright and Aboriginal activist Jack Davis wrote his first book, a collection of poems, twenty-two years ago. Poetry, in his words, “has a beauty of its own which prose cannot reach. It is the elixir of life.”

Here in poems of celebration, introspection and lament, the grace and wisdom of his voice resonates. He touches on feelings and expectations, in a world we all share, and reflects upon nature, urban life, youth, love and relationships, the past, and the day to day.

Mabel Edmund's true-life stories begin with her happy childhood spent among Aborigines and freed slaves.

At 14 her father and her strongly Christian mother sent her out west to muster cattle and sheep on properties owned by their friends. There she met a stockman, Digger Edmund, who brought her back to his South Sea Islander community on the central Queensland coast.

The youngest bride in the community, Mabel Edmund was taken in by the womenfolk. They taught her how to chop firewood, draw water from a well, cook a porcupine, and bake a feather-light sponge cake.

At 16, while the rest of Australia celebrated the end of World War II, she was living in the bush with her young family, reluctantly sharing her dirt-floored home with cheeky dingoes, carpet snakes, and deadly taipans.

With her husband often away working, Mabel Edmund's cheerful optimism brought the family safely through its disasters. She then embarked on successful careers in local politics, black activism and art.

Highly Commended—1989 David Unaipon Award

The three are Sandy, a white man; Bindi, a Murri; and Mulga, related on his mother's side to Bindi, and on his Irish father's side to Sandy. Their saga—and enduring friendship—covers forty years in the mulga country of the far west. It tells how Sandy achieves his dream of owning a cattle empire; how Bindi regains part of his tribal lands for his people; and how Mulga finally sits down to write about their shared experiences.

Unbranded
ranges across rollicking picnic races and the famous Mt Isa Rodeo, gutsy outback pubs and childhood in the yumbah. Its cast of stockmen, cattle owners, shearers, barmaids and tourists presents a rich panorama of Australia. Mulga's journey also brings him face-to-face with the dark side of urban despair and his people's struggle with alcohol.

Herb Wharton was highly commended—1990 David Unaipon Award

The impassioned voices here are many and diverse. Each carries the message
We are all people.

This collection was first published in 1979. The issues it addresses—deaths in custody, prejudice, powerlessness, love, devotion and struggle—are just as urgent and important now as they ever were.

Award-winning Aboriginal author Bill Rosser writes a chilling story of the infamous Queensland Native Police Force, a murderous band of black troopers led by white officers. Their activities contributed to the extermination of whole tribes of Aborigines.

Rosser's investigations were triggered by the story of Cyclone Jack of the Bandjalung people, who recounts the atrocities witnessed by his grandfather and father (then a boy of five). He describes the massacre led by Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler in which the brutal slaughter extended to women and children, the old and the infirm.

Cyclone Jack's disturbing oral account is backed and skilfully crosscut with careful documentary research and leavened with gentle, at times raucous, humour. The author of
Dreamtime Nightmares
has again produced a compellingly readable account, in vivid, flesh-and-blood terms, of little-known events from Queensland's suppressed past.

Winner—1991 Ruth Adeney Koori Award

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

This publication assisted by the Australia Council, the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body.

The David Unaipon Award, and this publication, receive financial assistance from the Queensland Government through the Minister for the Arts