Commentary

A magabala seed

Lilly Brown and the next 10,000 years of an Indigenous press

by Ruby Lowe •

August 2025, no. 478

Commentary

A magabala seed

Lilly Brown and the next 10,000 years of an Indigenous press

by Ruby Lowe •

August 2025, no. 478

Peter Bibby, Merrilee Lands, and June Oscar heading to a Magabala book launch, 1990 (courtesy of Magabala Books)

Located on Yawuru Country in Rubibi (Broome), Magabala Books is one of the most remote publishers in the world. This First Nations publishing house has helped redefine Australian publishing since the 1980s by continually ensuring that Aboriginal stories and voices are in print. Since its formal establishment in 1987 – following a landmark desert meeting in 1984 and with funding from the Australian Bicentenary Authority’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program and the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre – Magabala has published more than 250 authors from across Australia. The press emerged in direct response to the widespread appropriation of Indigenous stories by Settler people and publishing houses and continues to define how publishing can best serve Aboriginal authors, artists, and illustrators.¹

Ruby Lowe

Ruby Lowe is an ABR Inglis Fellow and an S. Ernest Sprott Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She writes about John Milton, popular print culture in seventh-century Britain, and Aboriginal literature. She is the co-editor, with Philip Morrissey and Marion Campbell, of Kim Scott: Language, readers, interpretation (UWA Publishing, 2019).