- Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Lonely Planet Publications; illustrated edition edition (1 July 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1864501146
- ISBN-13: 978-1864501148
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.7 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 894,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
This guide is ideal for travellers who want to understand Australia's 50,000-year-old cultural tradition. More than 60 Indigenous people have contributed to this guide, together with some of Lonely Planet's most experienced guidebook researchers. Includes an introduction to Indigenous languages.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Australian Aboriginal society has the longest continuous cultural history in the world. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Australian Aboriginal society has the longest continuous cultural history in the world. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Many visitors to Australia will clutch their trusty Rough Guide or Lonely Planet, but neither will give you an insight into one of the worlds oldest civilisations in quite the way this book does. Go without it and you could miss the indigiounous Australia right under your nose.
It covers aspects of Australia in much the same way to other guidebooks, divided into regions and outlining history, geography, tours, shops and sights to visit in that area. It features sacred sites, information tours, festivals and shops run by aboriginals selling genuine arts and crafts, rather than the gaudy mass produced digeridoos or boomerangs seen elsewhere.
There are colour sections explaining areas of special interest, including Uluru (Ayres rock), art, sport, bush medicine and Kakadu national park amongst others. As you would expect from a Lonely Planet, it has many clearly set out maps and is easy to use as a reference guide. There are detailed explanations of the Dreamtime ancient stories, the arrival of white men in Australia and recent aboriginal land trials which I found extremely informative and useful during my travels.
It is meant as a travel guide to accompany others, and also to give a voice to many aboriginal people who have a point of view to air. The authors have selected local people, who are often poorly educated due to the deprivations of their past, but who have an important insight into their culture and history often writing for the first time. They write vignettes to accompany the main text. In this respect the book slightly lets itself down: the tone can be "preachy" or condemnatory. No doubt it is relevant to the understanding of aboriginal Australia, but pointing out the failures of the past to those who buy the book is preaching to the converted and can make for difficult reading. Many of the authors make the same point as each other and there is a definite "central message" of triumph through adversity. Using local narrative in this way is a noble idea, but could do with a little editing!
However, in summary it is an excellent reference to a complicated subject, handled well and presented with style.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
EXCELLENT!!!
5 Dec 2002
Format:Paperback
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!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A good introduction, with a lot of heart
11 April 2006
Format:Paperback
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.
1 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Dissapointing and negative. Not worthy of Lonely Planet.
11 Feb 2005
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
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