Kings In Grass Castles

PMM index ref: MDM/KF. Drafts for a potential screenplay of Kings in grass castles (versions by David Williamson and Denis Whitburn, and John Goldsmith), correspondence and notes.

When Patrick Durack left Ireland for Australia in 1853, he was to found a dynasty of pioneers, and build an empire of cattle-land across the great stretches of Australia. His grand-daughter, Mary Durack, with a profound sense of family history, has rebuilt the saga of the Duracks, a saga that is the story of Australia itself, huge, pioneering, and tremendous in concept.

Fierce polemical booklet that affects to tell the real story of the pastoralist industry in Australia and how it impacted on indigenous Australians,the land ,wildlife,forests & soil.

Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

Through war, love affairs, children and old age, the Duracks' creative lives were always shaped by the enduring power of the Kimberley region. With unprecedented access to hundreds of private family letters, unpublished memoirs, diaries and papers, Brenda Niall gets to the heart of a uniquely Australian story.