Legendary Tales Of The Australian Aborigines - Hardcover

David Unaipon - the man on the Australian $50 note - was a most extraordinary person. An early Aboriginal political activist, he was also a scientist, a preacher and an inventor. In the 1920s, under contract to the University of Adelaide, he was commissioned to collect traditional Aboriginal stories from around South Australia. The stories were published in 1930 as "Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals", but the author of the work was given as W. Ramsay Smith, FRS, anthropologist and Chief Medical Officer of South Australia. Unaipon's name does not appear anywhere in the book, except where he is mentioned in passing as a "narrator". In putting together this edition of the stories Unaipon collected and transcribed, the editors have undertaken a "literary repatriation", restoring the text to its original form and bringing it home to its community. The authors have righted the injustices done to David Unaipon by the brazen appropriation of his stories and by the patronizing editorial changes effected by Ramsay Smith.

Professor Stephen Muecke is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney. His previous publications include Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings (1990) and No Road: Bitumen All the Way(1997). Dr Adam Shoemaker is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Queensland University of Technology.