The Lives of Stories traces three stories of Aboriginal–settler friendships that intersect with the ways in which Australians remember founding national stories, build narratives for cultural revival, and work on reconciliation and self-determination.

This edited collection focuses on Aboriginal and Māori travel in colonial contexts. Authors in this collection examine the ways that Indigenous people moved and their motivations for doing so. Chapters consider the cultural aspects of travel for Indigenous communities on both sides of the Tasman. Contributors examine Indigenous purposes for mobility, including for community and individual economic wellbeing, to meet other Indigenous or non-Indigenous peoples and experience different cultures, and to gather knowledge or experience, or to escape from colonial intrusion.

This book covers the missionary activity in Australia conducted by non-English speaking missionaries from Catholic and Protestant mission societies from its beginnings to the end of the mission era. It looks through the eyes of the missionaries and their helpers, as well as incorporating Indigenous perspectives and offering a balanced assessment of missionary endeavour in Australia, attuned to the controversies that surround mission history.

In this volume, Katharine Booth and Lisa Ford present the details of a watershed Northern Territory legal decision. Angela Lapham challenges our understanding of the term ‘assimilation’ in her study of Stanley Middleton. Charmaine Robson looks at Australian leprosy control policy in the twentieth century. The ‘entanglements’ of Aboriginal and European people within farming and pastoral industries on Yorke Peninsula (Guuranda), South Australia, are recorded by Belinda Liebelt, Amy Roberts, Clem O’Loughlin and Doug Milera.

Colonial exploration continues, all too often, to be rendered as heroic narratives of solitary, intrepid explorers and adventurers. This edited collection contributes to scholarship that is challenging that persistent mythology. With a focus on Indigenous brokers, such as guides, assistants and mediators, it highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century exploration in Australia and New Guinea was a collective and socially complex enterprise.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been protecting country since time immemorial. One way they have continued these traditions in recent times is through service in the Australian military, both overseas and within Australia. In Defence of Country presents a selection of life stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ex-servicemen and women who served in the Australian Army, Navy and Air Force after World War Two.

Volume 39 presents a special section on Aboriginal war service, edited by Allison Cadzow, Kristyn Harman and Noah Riseman. The contributors reappraise narratives and foster new avenues of inquiry, particularly on the impact of war service on families and communities, and explore how the entrance of Aboriginal men into Australian military service disrupted accustomed notions of defence of country. John Maynard extends this service back to the South African Anglo-Boer War.

In this volume, Mitchell Rolls reconsiders the question of silence in Aboriginal history by examining a wide range of literature on Indigenous themes, which was produced during the period dubbed by W.E.H. Stanner as the ‘Great Australian Silence’. Felicity Jensz uncovers the significance of matrimony in Moravian missionaries’ attempts to Christianise Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century, and Anne McGrath traces the history and continuing legacy of relationships between Aboriginal and Irish people in Australia.

In this volume, Grace Karskens extends her cross-cultural research on early colonial New South Wales by focusing on the uses of European clothing by Aboriginal men. Leah Lui-Chivizhe describes the participation of Torres Strait Islander men in railway construction work in Western Australia. Noah Riseman focuses on the life of one man to explore the experience of institutionalisation as a member of the Stolen Generations and later as a member of the Australian armed forces.