Customer Reviews

Aboriginal Australia & the Torres Strait Islands: Guide to Indigenous Australia (Lonely Planet)

5 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have been researching the discrimination faced by the Aboriginal people for several years. Until I found this book, I'd never seen any book that I thought accurately portrayed the situation. The book is excellent. It contains general information about important issues and has very detailed sections for each state/territory. It is a necessity for anyone interested in the Aboriginal history and culture!

I'm heading to Australia to work on Aboriginal civil rights issues, and picked up this book a few months ago as an intro. While it is certainly no legal treatise, it is a great introduction to an interesting and diverse group of people and their history and struggles to survive European colonization. The reviewer below seems to object to the obvious emotion with which much of the book is written. You should know that, while it is in large part the work of Lonely Planet writers and researchers, they also went straight to the source and have many, many shorter pieces written by Aboriginal people whom they asked to contribute. If you are looking for a dry, detached work of anthropological research, this is not it. If you want an exposure to a variety of topics in the voices of the people about whom they are written, this is a great resource. It is an admirable achievement from Lonely Planet, and a moving testimonial to the world's oldest continuous culture.

This book is full of bitterness and resentment, it is full of repeating terms such as "and there are still some in goverment who still refuse to utter the word 'sorry'".

The authors (and there are alot of them) should realise what a readers motivation is in picking up this book. Is it to be given a politically weighted, bitter (and actually quite shallow) account of indigenous culture? Or is it to gain a wider appreciation of a subject which in massive and very interesting in a positive way? An example of this books shallowness is p67 and the (brief) section given to aboriginal art, amongst a lot of resentment it mentions that Papunya was the birth of the aboriginal art movement as we know it today and that the some of the Elders of the community where encouraged to paint, no mention of Geoff Bardon who was the driving force behind the movement and who risked great personal hardship to do so.

Dissapointing and negative.