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Australian history

flying copy

The Flying Kangaroo

$49.99
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No symbol better conveys the intrepid spirit of Australia than the flying kangaroo. Whether it’s glimpsed on a red-eye flight to an interstate business meeting, before leaving for adventure or holidays, or when longing to return home, that sweep of red defines air travel in Australia.

Qantas has always been about connection. It began by connecting Australians across western Queensland’s unforgiving terrain, and before long was connecting Australia with the world. Qantas’s history is entwined with Australian identity, launching in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu, and soaring to match Australian ambitions in the one hundred years since. Its centenary year has been the most turbulent year yet, with a pandemic grounding virtually the entire fleet and Qantas coming to the rescue of Australians stranded overseas.

Like Australia, Qantas will soar again. The Flying Kangaroo features never-before-seen photographs and historical detail from Qantas’s archives, celebrating a century of Australian aviation and a nation that always reaches for the sky.

colonists

What the Colonists Never Knew

$35.00
By,

What the Colonists Never Knew paints a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up Aboriginal in Sydney, alongside the colonists, from 1788 to the present.

Dennis, the grandson ofClarice Malinda Lougher, the last practising matriarch of the Gai-mariagal clan, was immersed in cultural knowledge and lore from an early age.Through his eyes we see a Sydney of totemic landscapes resonating with ceremonial sites and ancestral activity, song-lines and walking tracks, habitat caves and middens, and share memories of what has been lost.

At Narrabeen camp in the 1950s we meet Uncle Willie de Serve, a man who wore the scarifications of his ritual life and mentored the young Dennis. ‘His face was alive with a thousand stories.’

Dennis also introduces us to Nanna Watson, who lived in a little humpy at Car-rang gel (North Head). ‘On a hot summer’s afternoon, she would hitch her dress up round her knees and wriggle around in the sand to get a couple of ugaries (pipis), chew one up and spit it into the water and put the other one on the line, and before you knew it she’d have a big whiting or a bream.’

Through the stories so generously told we may reflect on what it means to be a stolen child and one of the ‘silent generations’, and to fight to safeguard culture and identity. We can sense the responsibility of being the senior Gai-mariagal and the last of the storytellers, and the urgency to document and share the knowledge bestowed on him by generations of his family.