A Town Is Born
There is nowhere else quite like Fitzroy Crossing. This social history combines archival records, and the oral histories of the Fitzroy Valley mob to tell the story of how it came to be, in the context of the upheavals in northern Australia in the 1960s.
Publisher: Magabala Books
Paperback: RRP $27.99
First Published 2013. New Edition Published 2019, PP 217
ISBN 978-1-925936-85-8
© Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre
The 1960s are remembered as a time of change and upheaval throughout the Western world, including Australia. No part of the country changed more in that decade than the remote pastoral regions of the north. But in these tropical parts the winds of change did not bring the anti-war movement, the counterculture, feminism, or the other issues that preoccupied the cities. Rather, they blew down an industry, a regime, a culture that for the best part of a century had thrived on a semi-feudal system of co-dependence between the all-powerful station bosses, and large communities of unpaid Aboriginal workers and their families.
In the course of a couple of years the township of Fitzroy Crossing in the remote Kimberley changed from a tiny frontier outpost, to a refugee camp with hundreds of people living in fringe camps in third world conditions. From this maelstrom a unique community emerged, with a strong ethos of cooperation and support amongst the various peoples of the Fitzroy Valley.
Awards
Short Listed, WA Premier’s Literary Awards, Western Australian History, 2014
From the author
‘I left my heart in Fitzroy Crossing,’ goes the Warumpi Band song. I know what they mean. I think of Fitzroy as my home town. The years I lived there in the late 1970s and early 1980s were the most formative of my life. There is nowhere else quite like it: it can be rough as guts, but there is also a magnificent strength and resilience about the people who live there. I’m proud to have had the opportunity to tell their story here.
The original cover from 2013
Reviews
“A Town is Born offers not just a landmark account of one of the most striking social experiments in northern Australia, but of the hidden forces that shaped and steered it: not just what the main figures in the unfolding Fitzroy saga did, but what they felt.”
“This book succinctly evokes the changing lives of Aboriginal people as they moved on to and then away from the pastoral stations established on their traditional country...An excellent and illuminating book.”