Last year I referred to two of Michael O'Rourke's great books on the the Kamilaroi.
In Train Reading - Michael O'Rourke's Kamilaroi Lands I said:
This is a local/regional history, but of a very different type to most of those published. Self-published by the author in 1997, this book is a detailed and painstaking exploration of the life of one Aboriginal language group at and in the period immediately following European settlement.
A month later reading the story of the Red Kangaroo, I said in Train Reading - Michael O'Rourke brings the Kamilaroi to life
The brilliance of Michael's work, and I use the word brilliance advisedly, is that it brings the Kamilaroi alive, a functioning people as they were at the time of colonisation and in the eighty years of decline that follows.
Michael's books are not perfect, just very good.
Michael has now bought some of this material on-line so that we can now look at it independent of the increasingly rare print copies.
The first on-line book, Passages to the North-West Plains, combines material from two of Michael's books. The second deals with the story of the Red Kangaroo.
Do have a browse. I know that the on-line format is more difficult. You cannot do as I did with the physical books and flick back and forwards, reading on trains and buses. But they are still very worthwhile.
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