Pack of four First Nations Classics:
Series three
by MaryAnn Bin-SallikTara June WinchPaul CollisBill Dodd

Emeritus Professor MaryAnn Bin-Sallik AO is a proud Jaru woman born in Broome, Western Australia, and spent most her life in Darwin, Northern Territory. In 1961, she graduated as a registered nurse from the Darwin Hospital. In 1975, she became the first Indigenous Australian person to be employed in Australia’s higher education sector, and was at the forefront of what is known as the Indigenous higher education sector. She retired from Charles Darwin University in 2008, and in recognition of her distinguished academic service was made an emeritus professor. In 2017, MaryAnn received the NAIDOC Female Elder of the Year Award. In the same the year, she was awarded an Order of Australia for her distinguished contribution to Australia’s education sector. In 2018, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Western Sydney University.

Tara June Winch is a Wiradjuri author, born in Australia in 1983 and based in France. Her first novel, Swallow the Air, was critically acclaimed and she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and has won numerous literary awards. A tenth anniversary edition was published in 2016. In 2008, Tara was mentored by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her second book, the story collection After the Carnage, was published in 2016. It was longlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Queensland Literary Award for a story collection. Her most recent novel, The Yield, won the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Paul Collis is a Barkindji man, born in Bourke in far western NSW on the Darling River. Paul worked in Newcastle for much of his young adult life in the areas of teaching and in Aboriginal community development positions. He has taught Aboriginal Studies to Indigenous inmates at the Worimi and Mount Penang juvenile detention centres and in Cessnock and Maitland prisons. Paul has a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Doctorate in Communications. He lives in Canberra and works as a Creative Writing academic at the University of Canberra. Dancing Home is his first novel and won the 2016 David Unaipon Award and the 2018 ACT Book of the Year Award.

Bill Dodd, born in 1965, spent his childhood in Mitchell, Queensland and on cattle properties in the area. He left school shortly before completing year ten, after the sudden death of his stockman father. For a time he worked as a stockman near Mitchell and later on a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory. Three days before his eighteenth birthday, Bill Dodd suffered a broken neck in a diving accident and became a quadriplegic. He spent almost six months in the spinal unit at Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital, and afterwards was transferred to Westhaven Nursing Home in Roma, living there for six years. In Roma he worked as a clerical assistant in the office of the Community Youth Support Scheme.