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William Cooper

An Aboriginal Life Story
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( 34 ratings, 9 reviews)
Format: Paperback / softback
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Focusing on William Cooper’s most important campaigns, this carefully researched study sheds important new light on the long struggle that Indigenous people have fought to have the truth about Australia’s black history heard and win representation in Australia’s political order.

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William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story details William Cooper's passionate struggle against the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the denial of their rights, as well as his heroic fight for them to become citizens in their own country. His efforts have been widely commemorated and celebrated.

By carefully reconstructing the historical losses his Yorta Yorta people suffered and endured, the book reveals how the first seventy years of Cooper's life inspired the remarkable political work he undertook in the 1930s.

Focusing on Cooper's most important campaigns, such as his famous petition to the British king George for an Aboriginal representative in the Australian parliament, his call for a day of mourning after 150 years of colonisation, the walk-off of the Yorta Yorta people from Cumeroogunga reserve in 1939, and his opposition to the establishment of an Aboriginal regiment in the Second World War, this carefully researched study sheds important new light on the long struggle that Indigenous people have fought to have the truth about Australia's black history heard and to win representation in Australia's political order.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780522879803

Publisher: Melbourne University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 04 April 2023

Country: Australia

Imprint: Melbourne University Press

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Weight: 272g

Pages: 277

About the Author

Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University and has held fellowships at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. In 2010 his book Possession- Batman's Treaty and the Matter of History won the Ernest Scott Prize for the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or colonial history. Previous works include Rights for Aborigines; Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History and Empire and The Making of Native Title- Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People. He is the co-editor of Telling Stories- Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand and Protection and Empire- A Global History.

Also by Bain Attwood

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  • The 1967 Referendum
    On 27 May 1967, a remarkable event occurred. An overwhelming majority of electors voted in a national referendum to amend clauses of the Australian Constitution concerning Aboriginal people. Today, it is commonly regarded as a turning point in the history of relations between Indigenous and white Australians: a historic moment when citizenship rights, including the vote, were granted, and the...
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  • Thinking Black
    Most non-Indigenous Australians know of Charles Perkins. Many are familiar with a few other Aboriginal leaders. Yet few have heard of William Cooper, one of the most important Aboriginal leaders in Australia's history. Thinking Black tells the story of Cooper and the Australian Aborigines' League, and their campaign for Aboriginal people's rights. Through petitions to government, letters to other campaigners...
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  • The Good Country
    Beyond the generalisations of national and colonial history, what can we know about how Aboriginal nations interacted with the British settlers who invaded their country, the men appointed by the imperial and colonial governments to protect them, and each other? In The Good Country Bain Attwood makes a major contribution to our knowledge of this period by providing a superbly...
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