Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Audio" in Cultural & Regional

In 1970, Lynda was 18, unmarried and pregnant when she was forced to give her baby up for adoption. She was sent by a doctor to a Catholic girls’ home for unmarried mothers, and told she’d have no hope of keeping her child because she was Aboriginal. After 26 years, Lynda was finally able to make contact with her lost son – but the much wished for reunion didn’t go well. When she looked into the adoption records, she found a web of lies – lies about her family, the baby’s father, her ‘consent’ for the adoption – and her Indigenous heritage had been completely erased.

In 1931 Molly led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1600-kilometre walk across remote Western Australia. Aged eight, eleven and fourteen, they escaped the confinement of a government institution for Aboriginal children removed from their families. Barefoot, without provisions or maps, tracked by Native Police and search planes, the girls followed the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it would lead them home. Their journey – longer than many of the celebrated treks of recognised explorers – reveals a past more cruel than we could ever imagine.

When she was two years old, Brenda and her siblings were taken from their parents. For the next five years she was a much-loved daughter in a white family, a happy child in a country town on the outskirts of Sydney, unaware of the existence of her Aboriginal family or how hard her parents were fighting for her return – unaware of her Aboriginal identity. Then, suddenly, she was reunited with her birth family, the last daughter to come home.

Dogs of all shapes and sizes visit Ruth Shaw's three wee bookshops in Manapōuri in the far south of Aotearoa New Zealand. Local dogs, holiday house dogs, travelling dogs – many have great stories, be they funny, sad, strange, bemusing, quirky or sweet. Woven throughout are tales of the very special Hunza, the dog who worked with troubled teens alongside Shaw when she was a youth worker.

It'd been a long time since I claimed some solitude in this blessed landscape; since I've done without life's little props. Here I have no friend, no dog, no radio, no clock, no phone, no roof, no body pollutants.

An Afghan refugee’s extraordinary journey - from his early life as a shepherd boy in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan, to his forced exile after being captured and tortured by the Taliban, to incarceration in an Australian detention centre...and finally, to freedom. This moving and poignant work gives the listener a rare insight into the contented ‘milk and honey’ life of a simple Afghan family before the civil war ripped their country apart. The lives and centuries-old livelihood of farmers, craftsmen and small business owners were destroyed in just weeks and months.

The Big Book of Australian Yarns is master storyteller Jim Haynes's comprehensive collection of factual and fascinating stories and humour. The yarns range from the poignant to the hilarious, from the ridiculously Australian to the unexplained and spooky. There are heroic and inspiring characters, as well as larrikins and crooks, and everyday humorous events told with a refreshing understatement that vividly evokes a vanishing Australia.

Welcome to the wild, wacky and wonderful world of outback Aussie festivals! Bill 'Swampy' Marsh has travelled far and wide to capture the true stories behind Australia's most unconventional festivals. You'll meet the larrikin locals, dedicated organisers and competitive spirits who turn cockroaches into champions, guinea pigs into thoroughbreds and dunnies into racing machines.

Because I Love Him by Ashlee Donohue is a memoir of rare insight into strong family ties, the intricacies of relationships and the unspoken expectations within urban Aboriginal communities. A proud Dunghutti woman, born and raised in Kempsey, NSW, Donohue was determined to keep her family together, despite the unforgivable acts and inevitable fallout, to gift her children what she never had – the presence of their father.

After spending almost 20 years in city courtrooms reporting for the ABC on some of the country’s highest profile cases, in The Outback Court Reporter, Jamelle Wells takes you into our country courtrooms, from the grand sandstone edifices of Cobar and Grafton to the repurposed community halls and police stations in outback Queensland and the Northern Territory – introducing you to the court staff, the witnesses and the accused, in cases that shock, captivate and divide communities.

Khin's sister Theda has a strange illness and a euthanasia drug locked in a box under her bed. Her doctor thinks her problem is purely physical, and so does she, but Khin is not so sure. He knows what they both went through growing up in Perth – it wasn't welcoming back then for a Burmese-Australian family. With Theda's condition getting worse, Khin heads off to the United States. He needs to sort things out with his ex-partner. Once there, events take a very odd turn, and he finds himself in court.

In this mother-daughter memoir, Samantha and Myrna each share their journeys of breaking down barriers and the redemptive power of love. Inspiring and honest, Role Model is the story of two proud Dunghutti women claiming their space and the path to greater representation, highlighting just how much can change in two generations.

Alana Valentine’s mother, Janice, was remarried in 1969 at the Wayside Chapel, run by the charismatic and controversial minister Ted Noffs and his wife Margaret. Many years after her mother died, Alana found the wedding photo, and the longing to speak to her mother about that day drove her to seek out others who had begun new chapters of their lives at Wayside.

Don’t Take Your Love to Town is a story of courage in the face of poverty and tragedy. Ruby recounts losing her mother when she was six, growing up in a mission in northern New South Wales and leaving home when she was 15. She lived in tin huts and tents in the bush and picked up work on the land while raising nine children virtually single-handedly. Later she struggled to make ends meet in the Koori areas of Sydney.

In 2018, on his way to a family holiday in Cairo, Australian-Egyptian citizen Hazem Hamouda disappears without warning, going missing somewhere between landing and customs. His eldest daughter, Lamisse, has recently moved to Egypt armed with a scholarship to the American University of Cairo, and overnight her world is turned upside down. With little Arabic and even less legal knowledge, she finds out her father has been arbitrarily arrested.

Growing up in the shifting landscape of Gundagai with her Nan and Aunties, Sunny spends her days playing on the hills near their farmhouse and her nights dozing by the fire, listening to the big women yarn about life over endless cups of tea. It is a life of freedom, protection and love. But as Sunny grows she must face the challenge of being seen as different, and of having a mother whose visits are as unpredictable as the rain.