The new volume, edited by Crystal McKinnon (University of Melbourne) and Ben Silverstein (ANU School of History), explores Aboriginal histories of survival, activism, cultural practice and resistance, from nineteenth-century smallpox epidemics to Black Power movements and Noongar care for Country: 

• Nicholas Pitt and Heidi Norman trace Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan histories of smallpox in the 1830s, emphasising Aboriginal understandings, responses to and treatments for the disease they called either Boulol or Thunna Thunna. This work reveals the networks of knowledge and experience that secured the survival of people in Country.
• Gary Foley, Clare Land and Shannon Woodcock document a Community Organisation Course offered at Swinburne College of Technology, 1975–1977. The importance of this course can be seen in the sovereign futures it enabled; participants went on in the following years to organise Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations and other Black Power movements across the southeast of the continent.
• Following this topic, Will Bracks describes the networks involved in organising Rock Against Racism concerts in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney throughout the 1980s. Organised in a manner characteristic of Black Power, this series of concerts raised political consciousness and generated resources to support Aboriginal communities.
• Turning to the West, Sean Winter considers Noongar practices of cultural burning in the mid-nineteenth century, a period of government suppression through legislation that limited the way Noongar people could care for Country; Winter shows us how an insistence on displacing Noongar knowledges has caused cultural and ecological harm.
• Lastly, Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui brings to the fore the valuable writing of John Naish, a Welsh author based in the Queensland cane fields in the mid-twentieth century, showing how Naish’s realist novels and autobiography offer an insight into the position and resistance of Aboriginal people in tropical north Queensland.

More information in ANU Press.