Book Description
Secondhand. Very good to near fine condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Dust jacket has some light creasing at top edge and at spine. Interior and binding are excellent.
From the first years of the squatters' invasion of the country of the Kamilaroi people on the Liverpool Plains of New South Wales to the end of the northward pastoral advance on the Plains of Promise south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, Judith Wright's forbears were involved in the great and almost unchronicled pastoral migration by which eastern Australia was first taken over by white men.
In her earlier book The Generations of Men, Wright told her family story in semi-novelised form, basing it on family documents. She now returns to those documents and sets her family history in the wider context of the pastoral history of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This book follows more closely the effect of the pastoral invasion on the indigenous Australians and documents the deterioration of pastures and the change in forest covers and water courses that followed the arrival of hard-hoofed animals in country never before heavily grazed.
With its glimpses of the events surrounding the notorious Native Police of Queensland, the Aboriginal retaliation at Cullin-la-Ringo and its fatal consequences, and the figures of the young pastoralists who variously encouraged, or bravely resisted, the Native Police massacres, this book throws new light on our past. (book flap)