Ebookshelf

Did you know that the Library has a huge range of free ebooks – 200,000 and counting! – which you can either read online or download for up to seven days?

To get started, browse our latest selection of ebooks and watch this space for new additions. You can also scan the list of past Ebookshelf titles or browse for even more free ebooks!

For tips and advice, read our Get started guide or watch our video on using ebooks.

To access ebooks from home, you need to be a State Library member with a Victorian home address. (Terms and conditions of use apply.)

Madukka, the River Serpent

Julie Janson

Crawley, Western Australia, Australia: UWA Publishing, 2022

Aunty June is the proud owner of a TAFE certificate III in Investigative Services. It took her thirty hours to complete online. Now, she has set up her own private investigation service: Yanakirri Investigative Services – Confidentiality Guaranteed.

When environmental activist – and Aunty's nephew, Thommo suddenly goes missing, and the police ignore the case, Aunty June takes it upon herself to uncover the secrets surrounding the disappearance. Corruption, commercial cotton farmers, bikies, racism, water theft, and unreliable local police – Aunty June is really up against it. Lies and corruption are hiding the truth from reaching the surface. And the Darling River, the sacred Barka, is running out of water. Aunty June may be out of her depth, but nothing will stop her fighting for her people and her land.

Longlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2023 Davitt Award for Best Adult Crime Novel.

Rattling Spears: a History of Indigenous Australian Art

Dear Son: Letters and Reflections From First Nations Fathers and Sons

Reading Aboriginal Women's Life Stories

Anne Brewster

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia: Sydney University Press, 2015

A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan's My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first wave focused mainly (if not exclusively) on the author, Aboriginal women's life stories widened over time to include transgenerational histories of the family.

Reading Aboriginal Women's Life Stories is an important discussion of books that have shaped our understanding of contemporary Indigenous Australian literature. Anne Brewster provides an in-depth textual analysis of three key titles and situates them in relation to concepts of history, race, gender, family, storytelling and Aboriginality in modern Australia.

Purple Threads

Jeanine Leane

St. Lucia, Brisbane, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2011

Winner of the 2010 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writing, Purple Threads is a humorous collection of rural yarns by a gifted storyteller. Jeanine Leane grew up on a sheep farm near Gundagai, and the stories are based on her childhood experiences in a house full of fiercely independent women. In between Aunty Boo's surveillance of the local farmers' sheep dip alliance and Aunty Bubby's fireside tales of the Punic Wars, the women offer sage advice to their nieces on growing up as Indigenous girls in a white country town.

The cast of strong Aboriginal women in a rural setting gives a fascinating insight into both Aboriginal and rural life. Farming is not an easy pursuit for anyone, but the Aunties take all the challenges in their stride, facing torrential rain, violent neighbours and injured dogs with an equal mix of humour and courage.

Defending country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military service since 1945

Noah Riseman and Richard Trembath

St Lucia, Brisbane, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2016

Few Australians realise the extent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in the military. Many enlisted before they had the right to vote, drink alcohol or even receive equal wages.

Defending Country is the first book to document the unique experiences of Indigenous Australian men and women since the Second World War. Using compelling personal narratives and rigorous archival research, it explores how military service impacted the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recruits. It also reveals how their involvement in Australia's defence contributed to the advancement of Indigenous rights.

Historians Noah Riseman and Richard Trembath examine what motivated Indigenous people to sign up, their experiences of racism in the armed forces, the challenges in returning to civilian life and the role of the Australian Defence Force in promoting Reconciliation.

William Cooper: an Aboriginal Life Story

Brian Attwood

Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Miegunyah Press, 2021

William Cooper's passionate struggle against the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the denial of their rights, and his heroic fight for them to become citizens in their own country, has been widely commemorated and celebrated. By carefully reconstructing the historical losses his people suffered and endured, William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story 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 - his famous petition to King George VI 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 Cummeragunja 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 tell the truth about Australia's black history and to win representation in Australia's political order.

Australian Plants as Aboriginal Tools

Philip A Clarke

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia: Rosenberg, 2012

In Australia, the flora has had a broad impact on the lives of Aboriginal people. Providing them with the essential materials for making their food, medicine, narcotics and stimulants.

Plants were also ecologically important for maintaining the populations of terrestrial fauna that hunter-gatherers once foraged upon for their subsistence. The flora has helped shape Aboriginal cultures over the millennia since their Ancestors first occupied the Australian continent.

This book describes the species that were essential for manufacturing Aboriginal weapons, tools, shelter, watercraft, ceremonial objects, clothing, ornaments and paint.

The book demonstrates how hunter-gatherers lived by making objects from plants and investigates similarities and differences in plant uses across Aboriginal Australia, as well as their distinctiveness in relation to practices from other parts of the world. It also gives an overview of Aboriginal people's changing relationship with the flora and describes current trends. The present work is jointly concerned with the ethnobotany and economic botany of Aboriginal Australia.