The speaking land is an anthology of almost 200 myth from a number of different aboriginal cultures. The stories are a major contribution to the development and recognition of an aboriginal traditional literature. The stories are grouped around themes such as snakes and rainbows, breaking the rules, stories of origins, eroticism and the clash of aboriginal and western cultures. None of the stories are of a secret-sacred nature.

Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia

Politics & Social Sciences

Berndt, Ronald M.

Berndt, Catherine Helen

Social Sciences

Penguin Group USA

This extraordinary book, written from material gathered over half a century ago, will almost certainly be the last fine-grained account of traditional Aboriginal life in settled south-eastern Australia. It recreates the world of the Yaraldi group of the Kukabrak or Narrinyeri people of the Lower Murray and Lakes region of South Australia. In 1939 Albert Karloan, a Yaraldi man, urged a young ethnologist, Ronald Berndt, to set up camp at Murray Bridge and to record the story of his people. Karloan and Pinkie Mack, a Yaraldi woman, possessed through personal experience, not merely through hearsay, an all but complete knowledge of traditional life. They were virtually the last custodians of that knowledge and they felt the burden of their unique situation. This book represents their concerted efforts to pass on the story to future generations. For Ronald and Catherine Berndt, this was their first fieldwork together in an illustrious joint career of almost fifty years. During long periods, principally until 1943, they laboured with pencil and paper to put it all down - a far cry from the recording techniques of today's oral historians. Their fieldnotes were worked into a rough draft of what would become, but not until recently, the finished manuscript. The book's range is encyclopaedic and engrossing - sometimes dramatic. It encompasses relations between and among individuals and clan groups, land tenure, kinship, the subsistence economy, trade, ceremony, councils, fighting and warfare, rites of passage from conception to death, myths, and beliefs and practices concerning healing and the supernatural. Not least, it is a record of the dramatic changes following European colonization. A World That Was is a unique contribution to Australia's cultural history. There is simply no comparable body of work, nor is there ever likely to be.

A World That Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia (Miegunyah Press Series)

History

Stanton, John E.

Australia & Oceania

Univ of British Columbia Pr

First published in 1964 and this fifth edition published in 1988, The World of the First Australians is a classic in the field of Australian Aboriginal Studies. As well as being a comprehensive reference book, covering a wide range of the many traditional societies and cultures that have existed on the Australian continent, it draws together the threads of Aboriginal belief and practice in general terms. This book brings together some of the material from over 40 years of the authors' anthropological research and fieldwork among Aborigines in many parts of Australia, supplemented with comprehensive statements from other sources. It concentrates on the past and present traditional life of Aboriginal Australians, and the tremendous changes that have overtaken them. The authors cover aspects such as social organisation, economic adaptation, relationship to land an dits resources, growing up and getting married, religious belief, myth and ritual, forms of sorcery and magic, law and order, oral literature and visual art.

The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life : Past and Present

Aboriginal Studies Pr

The aboriginal Australians: The first pioneers

Pitman

Aboriginal Australian Art

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

New Holland Books

Pheasant and Kingfisher: Originally Told by Nganalgindja in the Gunwinggu Language

Two men escape from danger by turning into birds in this aboriginal myth from Australia which explains how the pheasant and kingfisher came into our world.

Children's Books

Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths

Mondo Pub.

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Books by Berndt, Catherine Helen