UQP acquires The Eagle and the Crow by Dr JM Field
UQP is delighted to announce that we’ve acquired JM Field’s original and impressive The Eagle and the Crow, which records and provides important insights into Indigenous ways of knowing and being, most notably the Gamilaraay kinship system.
The Eagle and theCrow is part instruction manual, part philosophy text written as a series of lyric essays. Digestible on their own, but intended to be enjoyed as a whole, chapters range from Gamilaraay conceptions of time and place, to relationships to knowledge, to the form and practical functions of kinship, more generally. In this sense, it is a love letter to current and future Gamilaraay people – a wholehearted attempt to rejuvenate a kinship system that was prohibited during the Missionary Era. To the non-Gamilaraay reader, it provides insight into alternative ways of relating and being in an increasingly confusing world.
UQP has acquired world rights and will publish in August 2025.
Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:
‘It’s rare to come across a work as distinctive as JM Field’s The Eagle and The Crow – his concise yet deeply researched essays at times read like poetry as they speak to us of Gamilaraay ways of experiencing and interacting with the natural world and each other. This book is a unique and discursive insight into non-Western knowledge systems and how they were misinterpreted and corrupted with the arrival of the colonisers. A book to savour and treasure, and one that will leave the reader changed.’
JM Field says:
‘I poured so much of myself into this little book – as most authors do, I suppose – and yet my goal for it, ultimately, is to one day not be read. Or rather, to not be needed. The series of lyric essays contained in The Eagle and the Crow are non-fiction; Gamilaraay philosophy, kinship and so on, but their writing demanded serious imagination. Namely, the insistence on a world where the knowledges contained within it, disrupted by the Missionary Era, are once again so commonplace that Gamilaraay people consider this book silly. This is what I mean when I say that I dream of it not being read or needed.
The Eagle and the Crow, too, was a personal exercise in disruption: so much of the writing about and around our knowledges is dead writing, literary mausoleums and palliative wards. With this book, I wanted these topics to instead feel alive and, in a sense, inevitable in their living. I’m not so sure I achieved that, but I think I made a start.’
About JM Field
Dr J.M. Field (Spearim) is a Gamilaraay mari from Moree way, but grew up on Darug land in a small town along the Great Dividing Range. He studied maths and French literature at the University of Sydney, before completing a doctorate in mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford. He was most recently a McKenzie Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne, where he focused on the mathematics and genetics of traditional kinship systems. He is also the author of Etta and the Shadow Taboo, which was highly commended for the Victoria Premier’s Literary Awards (Indigenous Writing) as well as shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (Children’s Literature).
For more information, contact Jean Smith on jean.smith@uqp.com.au
