UQP's
First Nations
Classics
Series 2
The second series of First Nations Classics welcomes 8 more titles to this line-up of iconic Indigenous voices who have shaped this country's literary landscape.
This second release of First Nations Classics ranges across genres, including novels, memoir and poetry, and features new introductions by some of today's most prominent First Nations writers.
Showcasing a number of Unaipon Award winners, the series is inspired by the richness and cultural importance of First Nations writing, and the longstanding role the University of Queensland Press (UQP) has had in publishing these works.
It aims to bring new readers and renewed attention to some brilliant, timeless books that are as important, engaging and relevant today as they were on first publication.
Read on for a closer look at the new series, and why you should add these 8 beautiful new editions to your bedside stack.
Win the set!
To celebrate the launch of second series of First Nations Classics from UQP, Contact is giving away a full set of the 8 books, valued at $150. Enter the draw for your chance to win. Terms and conditions apply.
Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling
What's it about?
Aboriginal lawyer, writer and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island off the Queensland coast in 1836. In this deeply personal book, Behrendt uses Eliza’s tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people – and indigenous people of other countries – have been portrayed in their colonisers’ stories.
Exploring works as diverse as Robinson Crusoe and Coonardoo, Behrendt looks at the stereotypes embedded in these accounts, including the assumption of cannibalism and the myth of the noble savage. Ultimately, Finding Eliza shows how these stories not only reflect the values of their storytellers but also reinforce those values – and how, in Australia, this has contributed to a complex racial divide.
Dreaming in the Urban Areas
What's it about?
Lisa Bellear’s poetry moves sharply between street-smart portrayals of poverty and dispossession, and the complexity of black love, identity and experience. She reaches into the unspeakable parts of a colonial past in order to unpick the ongoing repercussions of Australia’s invasion and history.
Written with poetic prowess and political bite, Bellear’s work is a reckoning force set against a backdrop of urban community and strength. Her boundless energy and activism shine throughout, ensuring that each poem has a striking clarity of vision. Dreaming in the Urban Areas is an incandescent work of integrity and truth that charts the enduring struggles for survival and recognition.
Bitin' Back
What's it about?
When the Blackouts' star player Nevil Dooley wakes one morning to don a frock and 'eyeshada', his mother's idle days at the bingo hall are gone forever. Mystified and clueless, single parent Mavis takes to bush-cunning and fast footwork to unravel the mystery behind this sudden change of face.
Funny and cleverly covert, too, this is a truthful rendering of small-town prejudice and racist attitudes. Hilarity prevails while desperation builds in the race to save Nevil from the savage consequences of his discovery in a town where a career in footy is a young black man’s only escape. Neither pig shoots, bust-ups at the Two Dogs, bare-knuckle sessions in the shed nor even a police siege can slow the countdown on this human timebomb.
Mazin Grace
What's it about?
Growing up on the Mission isn’t easy for clever Grace Oldman. When her classmates tease her for not having a father, she doesn’t know what to say. Papa Neddy says her dad is the Lord God in Heaven, but that doesn’t help when the Mission kids call her a bastard.
As Grace slowly pieces together clues that might lead to answers, she struggles to find a place in a community that rejects her for reasons she doesn’t understand.
In Mazin Grace, Dylan Coleman fictionalises her mother’s childhood at the Koonibba Lutheran Mission in South Australia in the 1940s and ‘50s. Woven through the narrative are the powerful, rhythmic sounds of Aboriginal English and Kokatha language, Mazin Grace is the inspirational story of a feisty girl who refuses to be told who she is, determined to uncover the truth for herself.
Is That You, Ruthie?
What's it about?
‘Is that you …?’ Matron’s voice would ring out across the dormitory. In that pause sixty little girls would stop in their tracks, waiting to hear who was in trouble. All too often the name called out would be that of the high-spirited dormitory girl Ruthie.
In the Depression years, Queensland’s notorious Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission became home to four-year-old Ruth until her late teens when she was sent out to serve as a domestic on a station homestead. Ruthie is the central character in this lively and candid memoir of institutional life. Her milestones and memories reflect the experiences of many dormitory girls. The strong and lasting bonds that developed between them all helped to compensate for family love and support denied them by the government's disruptive removal policy.
An inspiring life story, this remarkable memoir won the David Unaipon Award in 1998.
Me, Antman & Fleabag
What's it about?
Take one woman, her partner Antman and their dog Fleabag, pack up the car, turn up the country music and you’ve got one spirited road trip makin’ room for all the good things in life, like family, laughin’, travellin’ and, best of all, love.
Winner of the 2006 David Unaipon Award, Me, Antman & Fleabag is packed to the roof with wicked black humour, eccentric aunties, six-fingered redheads, and martyrs to the cause of sheep well-being – all carried along with a dose of Slim Dusty for good measure.
Gayle Kennedy has a gift for telling tales and making them sparkle with warmth and pathos in equal measure. Me, Antman & Fleabag is a funny and incisive look at contemporary Indigenous life and the family and friends that make it up. So hold on to your boongalungs; this’ll be a crackin’ ride.
Smoke Encrypted Whispers
What's it about?
Smoke Encrypted Whispers showcases Samuel Wagan Watson’s imaginative brilliance and exceptional poetic skills. In this book, which also includes work from three previous collections, his poems pulse with the language and images of a mangrove-lined river city, the beckoning highway, the just-glimpsed muse, the tug of childhood and restless ancestors. Wagan Watson’s poetry is the work of an artist who speaks to a sense of our common humanity, and to a communal attachment to place. Reading this book is, as Tony Birch points out, ‘like witnessing Bruce Springsteen meet the Dreamtime’.
Plains of Promise
What's it about?
In this brilliant novel, Alexis Wright evokes city and outback, deepening our understanding of human ambition and failure, and making the timeless heart and soul of this country pulsate on the page.
In the 1950s Gulf Country of Queensland’s far North, black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic’s Mission. When Ivy Koopundi and her mother arrive at the Mission, they are immediately separated and Ivy’s life changes irrevocably. Years later, Mary, a young woman who is working for a city-based Aboriginal Coalition, visits the old Mission and learns of her mother’s and grandmother’s suffering there. Mary’s return reignites community anxieties, leading the Council of Elders to again turn to their spirit world.
This stunning novel, from the only writer to win both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize, showcases Alexis Wright’s distinctive and far-reaching talents.
Her latest novel is Praiseworthy, which received the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction in 2023 and the 2024 Stella Prize. This year, in addition to receiving an Honorary Doctorate from The University of Queensland, she also became the first author to win the Stella Prize twice.
She is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
Win the set!
To celebrate the launch of second series of First Nations Classics from UQP, Contact is giving away a full set of the 8 books, valued at $150. Enter the draw for your chance to win. Terms and conditions apply.
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