Just So Stories

To conclude this week of NAIDOC posts, I want to bring your attention to these two titles for adults. Contrary to my usual practice of only reviewing what I’ve read, I’ve just not had time to get to these [though I certainly intend to!]. But for your benefit, I’m giving them a plug now.

Deep History: Country and Sovereignty – edited by Ann McGrath and Jackie Huggins

New South Books

9781761170300 / July 2025  RRP $49.99

If you’re a Queenslander, you already know the name of Dr Jacqueline (Jackie) Huggins, member of the Bidjara and Birri Gubba Juru peoples: author, academic and advocate for First Nations peoples. Ann McGrath is also an author and academic, with a deep interest history and particularly, colonialism.

What is deep history? How do histories make sovereignty on Country? What is history’s future?

For Aboriginal people, the past is the present. Competing histories form and transform the lands, peoples and nations of Oceania, from the Pacific Islands, New Guinea and Aotearoa/New Zealand to Australia. In nations impacted by colonialism, such questions are particularly pertinent. First Nations peoples have long made history, living on their Country far longer than the colonial invaders.

In Deep History: Country and Sovereignty, edited by Ann McGrath and Jackie Huggins, leading historians and thinkers explore Indigenous histories of caring for places and people over millennia. With contributions from Brenda L. Croft, Anna Clark, Lynette Russell and many more, Deep History considers how stories of the past and the future are inscribed on land, waterways and skies. Walking on Country, gardening and agriculture and rock art are historical practices that continue to play an important role in asserting sovereign rights.

Uprising: War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844 – Stephen Gapps

9781742238029 /April 2025 / RRP $36.99

The award-winning author of The Sydney Wars reveals the breadth of frontier resistance warfare.

The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance ended in 1824 with a series of massacres conducted by settlers in the Bathurst region. From the 1830s, colonists began occupying more and more Aboriginal land across western New South Wales and stocking it with sheep and cattle. By 1838, a dramatic fightback began across the entire frontier of the colony. What has been called the Second Wiradyuri War of Resistance, from 1839 to 1841, was, in fact, part of a vast arc of conflict from present-day northern Victoria through to southeast Queensland. At the time, it was seen by many contemporaries as a concerted and coordinated ‘uprising’.

In Uprising, Stephen Gapps reveals the incredible story of this extensive frontier resistance warfare for the first time – a series of wars that were conducted along a huge area of the Murray-Darling river system, across many First Nations’ lands, in a concerted defence of River Country.