Indigenous Australia for Dummies

This is the book I could have used when I was starting to write Crow Country almost fifteen years ago. Beginning from a base of near-total ignorance, I scrounged around my local libraries for any text I could find that touched on the history and culture of Australia's First Nations. It was a pretty mixed bag, ranging from picture books of Dreaming stories to scholarly texts in anthropology, and it took a long period of study before I was able to piece together anything like a coherent picture.

In the years since then, there has been an explosion of fiction and non-fiction both by and about First Nations people, and I'm still learning. But Professor Larissa Behrendt's Indigenous Australia for Dummies is the excellent, comprehensive primer that would have set me on the right path.

I particularly enjoyed the early sections on culture and history, but I must admit my eyes began to glaze over during the portions on legal precedents (this is why I wasn't a very good law student). The sections on the struggle for civil and land rights were disheartening to read. The later sections on contemporary contributions to art, theatre, literature, music and sport were also very interesting, and I was glad to see that Behrendt didn't ignore her own achievements. (I'm a big fan of her novel After Story from a few years ago.)

This is a fat reference book that I will keep on the shelf and check when needed. This copy is the second edition and I'm sure it will be updated again as necessary.