Australia Books

At last, a book about 'social work' this is not jingoistically professional in orientation. I couldn't cope with the 'professionalism' in the Social Work Dept. at the local university, so what a joy to read a most-sane and expansive model of community work that did not espouse professionalism in a precious manner. This book is a godsend of refreshing encouragement, and a much appreciated reorientation away from professionalism toward 'community'. The author presents a strong practical and convincing theoretical approach to community development.

Complete Book of Australian Birds is a beautiful, oversized hardcover edition of this book. It is an excellent resource for working out what kind of bird you just saw, or just reading out the avian types that inhabit the country, in general. Definitely a very nice publication, and well worth a look for those interested in the feathered types.

excellent book, there are so many pictures to guide you to make a good work

An excellent field guide. It is complete with photos of the larvae and adult along with drawings to show important identification points. The only thing lacking is the season of adult flight.

I was very pleased with this publication. It's one of the most comprehensive books on an artist I have ever seen.

This book was alternately infuriating and interesting. Two days after finishing it, I noticed that my RSI (of ten years) had disappeared. Hallelujah!

This wonderful dictionary was published many years ago. I had two copies of it. Unfortunately, over time, I lost them. My native language is not English. I am grateful to the publisher and author/compiler for this dictionary as it immensely helped me building my vocabulary. The presentation of entries was very facilitating and the pronunciation for each entry was given in a unique way that the book definitely did help the reader learn the proper pronunciation. In my strong opinion, this book should never become out of print. It will have its use generation after generation.

Ashiqul Hai Saiyed

The collaboration of Patricia Crawford and Ian Crawford, Contested Country is a fact-filled, 303-page, highly recommended history of the area surrounding Northcliffe, a small Western Australia country town. Ably presented as a microcosm of Australian society and socio-environ-mental history, Contested Country expertly and informatively explores the ways in which different people have strived to shape the land to suit their own needs, with a close eye on divisions between Aboriginal and European attitudes.

I was lucky enough to travel from my home in Southern California to Tasmania to study abroad through my school, UCLA. At the University of Tasmania I had Professor Kirkpatrick for my Vegetation Management class, for which we bought this book. I assumed it would be dry, too large, too detailed, and boring, but it ended up proving to be inspiring, well-written, informative, and to the point. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in a) environmental issues, b) the management of plants (especially Australian plants, although the knowledge is useful for any bioregion), or c) some general philosophies, arguments, and reasonings for conservation of nature and the effect of humans on the environment. I am a Geography major and risked overpacking my bags for the flight back to Cali in order to bring this book back; despite my broke status at the end of my study abroad semester, I refused to sell this book back.

Private lives of the mob
A photographer joined an Aboriginal community to record their lives in a book, writes Victoria Laurie | March 29, 2008 The Australian newspaper

IN the heavy, noiseless air of desert country, an Aboriginal community is out hunting when the sound of a camera shutter cuts the air like a bullet from a gun. Heads turn, questions are asked and the -- usually white -- photographer is suddenly centre stage in an inquisition.

An image of Martu youngsters from Conversations with the Mob. Picture: Megan Lewis
The curtain of suspicion can hang heavily in such cases between image-taker and subject, prompting a turned away head or a shielding hand. It can provoke unease on the part of a person viewing the image that it has been captured opportunistically, even sneakily.

The absence of such telltale defences and doubts is what strikes one immediately about Conversations with the Mob, photojournalist Megan Lewis's 240-page collection of photographs and conversations with the Martu people of northwest Western Australia. The 100 large-format pictures have not emerged from a fly-in, fly-out form of photography but from a mutually trusting relationship that took time to build.

We see the mob striding along a dirt track under a brilliant rainbow sky, oblivious to the wanti (white woman) clicking from the side. A child reclines in a water-filled wheelbarrow and stares calmly up into the camera's eye. Two old women sit in an open-air sorry camp, absorbed in their (usually undocumented) grief. A young couple entwined on a bed have clearly invited the photographer into their domestic intimacy, their small son lying relaxed on the floor beside them.

"That's two years of relationship to take that picture," Lewis tells me on the veranda outside the house she shares in Fremantle. "I went out there to be a fly on the wall, but I soon realised that you cannot live in their world and not be part of it. I had to become part of the community."

Lewis was a staff photographer in the Perth bureau of The Australian in 2000 when she made a flying visit up north to a spot in the Great Sandy Desert to photograph Martu youngsters attending a training session with an ex-AFL football player. It was a straightforward news story, but Lewis was struck by the cheerful young men and the sense of genuine caring between coach and players, an optimism rarely depicted by a media focused on drunkenness and sexual abuse.

"When I went out there that day I had this gut feeling ... It was such a strong feeling that I knew I had to come back."

She did, several times, despite the 1600km drive north to the spot between the Great Sandy Desert and the Little Sandy Desert, near Rudall River National Park, marked Parnngurr-Cotton Creek on the map. She got to know community leaders in the remote town, with its itinerant population of 120 people living in and around 25 swelteringly hot corrugated iron houses, its school and store, and its neighbouring town of Punmu ("4 1/2 half hours away, or nine on the back road if it's washed out").

Then, one day, it simply didn't seem good enough just to drop in. The sound of the camera shutter still sounded alien and the question "What are you here for?" haunted even Lewis. She had talked long and often with older Martu leaders, now friends, about recording their lives in a book. "Is it all right for me to come back here and stay?" she asked a community meeting. They said yes.

In 2002 she quit her job at The Australian, packed her sparse belongings, camera and film into a four-wheel-drive and headed north. For 2 1/2 years, Lewis would reappear in Perth only periodically, worrying her friends with her exhausted and dehydrated appearance.

But her slender build belied a tougher constitution. She endured the hottest year on record, with temperatures soaring into the high 40s as she camped out with the mob in places where there was no shade or drove hundreds of kilometres to funerals and footy carnivals. Conversations with the Mob is the result, a remarkable book that took Lewis another three years to complete and find a publisher. When the book is launched in Fremantle next weekend, some of the mob will stand beside her to celebrate six years of intimate friendship and their collaborative effort to capture the rarely seen heart of an indigenous world.

"Life in a remote community is intense and unpredictable; personal lives are fiercely guarded from outsiders," Lewis writes in her introduction to Conversations with the Mob.

"For trust to be established, I had to be an active community member, a natural part of their order. In certain moments, I found myself sliding into their whole existence. A more senior member of the mob, my friend Nancy Taylor, said to me, 'Wanti, you gotta learn to dance Martu way and stay here with us."' Lewis was given permission to photograph funerals. "I was taking pictures of my close friends and their pain. It was a great challenge for me to be in their world but not of it; to keep sight of the bigger picture."

Even more important were the long talks into the night around campfires, after Lewis had decided she must "live completely in the moment, ignoring and ultimately forgetting my Western clock, having no expectations, being patient and sleeping anywhere". What Lewis heard were vivid accounts by Martu elders of meeting their first white man in the desert or women describing how, in the old days, giving birth to twins posed a life-and-death dilemma for resource-poor desert people.

She listened to Chevy talking about the pain of his brother's death and why he set fire to a palm tree and ended up in jail. How Jennifer Thomas would make her husband's life hell if he took a second wife. Why Clarrie Robinson gets sick of "humbug for money" when other community members know he earns a wage. Interspersed through the book, the conversations Lewis wrote down in the speakers' words are as richly illuminating as the images about living the Martuway.

"I was promised when I was only 16 to an old man," one young woman told Lewis. "I felt alone in myself, no support from anyone, sick in mystomach. They couldn't make me, I just keptmoving around, hiding in the old girl's (grandmother's) bed. He (she) not tell anyone. It doesn't work any more. They just walk off in differentdirections."

Lewis, who was born and reared in rural New Zealand, has long been attuned to handling tricky situations. She has covered every kind of fast-breaking and fraught news story, from civil unrest in East Timor and Indonesia to the Tampa crisis. She has had her share of spreads in the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post and even a front cover for Time magazine. But she admits that nothing prepared her for the amount of death and distress that Aboriginal society endures, even relatively strong, no-grog communities such as Parnngurr and Punmu.

"People are suffering grief on all accounts. Grief at losing a way of life, grief because they don't see a future, grief because you've just lostsomebody. One of my friends is 22 and he's lost two brothers in the time I've known him. He's highly strung and he gets angry but he's trying so hard to keep himself on track.

"I was up at the school one time and there was lots of screaming and wailing down at the camp, and I thought someone had passed away. A whole group of the women came up and said a young man who was known to be a sniffer had gone silly in the head. He was hitting his head with a crowbar, and other people. The nurse had locked herself in the clinic and they said, 'She's frightened, you gotta come.'

"I went down with them and I stood a little distance away and called out, 'You put that crowbar down and I'll come up and talk to you.' He did and he told me he'd heard voices in his head. I took him up to the clinic and I and an old maparn (spirit) healer worked on him."

It was another, less orthodox way that Lewis connected with the community. Empathy, intuitive ability, maparn, magic: whatever the label, she felt strongly the importance of spirit forces in people's lives.

"The mob use their intuition and it's a part of life," says Lewis, who used her own intuitive abilities to help a party of Aboriginal men find a young man's body in the desert, weeks after his car had broken down. Unsurprisingly, the psychic aspects of Martu life and Lewis's engagement with them were hardest to explain to sceptical publishers and editors.

"We need maparn medicine because maparn can fix people who are sick where doctors can't," her friend Waka Taylor told her. "They don't need to use drugs. When people's spirit no good, maparn can clean their inside. They should see maparn first, then go to hospital."

Lengthy discussions with the mob have resulted in tentative plans for a health centre that combines Western medicine with alternative therapies, including the use of the Martu's spiritual healing.

Lewis simply points out to disbelievers that conventional medicine alone has made halting inroads into physical and mental illnesses, and that whitefella diets are killing people.

"A lot of people were born before whitefella contact, and they are the ones who seem to live longer. The ones brought up on a whitefella diet die young."

When Lewis eventually left the desert she "felt an enormous sense of responsibility on my shoulders to get this book out in time, before the old people passed away ... Parnngurr and Punmu were unique because the elders were very strong at keeping the drugs and drinking out. And if anyone was suspected of mistreating a child, or the mother was in town drinking, then the other women would take it and look after it. The community was strong, but the more the old people died, the more cracks started to appear."

In the years since Lewis started going north, change has inevitably drifted in. Close friends have come down to Perth for kidney dialysis or psychiatric care, more children have been born, leadership rifts have emerged over how to handle a uranium deposit on the community's doorstep.

People around Lewis have watched her struggle to get the book this far, turning down certain funds or publishing offers because they compromised the way she wanted the story told. Then in 2005, some of the published images won her a Walkley award.

Lewis hesitates when asked how the future looks for the Martu people. "I don't know if optimism is the word. I never give up on the mob because you can feel there's no way out and then they will always surprise you. They are the most extraordinary human beings."

Conversations with the Mob by Megan Lewis (University of Western Australia Press, $49.95).