‘We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay our respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.’ No doubt you’ve heard an acknowledgement like this countless times, maybe even said it yourself or put it in your email signature. What you mightn’t know so well is the history behind that acknowledgement or the complex and diverse perspectives that make up Melbourne’s Aboriginal present. If those questions fascinate you, or you just want to understand your own city a little better, then Julie Andrews’ new book Where’s All the Community? offers an inviting yet comprehensive overview of Aboriginal Melbourne.

Drawing from her doctoral research, Andrews details Melbourne’s steady transformation from a colony that segregated and disempowered its original inhabitants on missions and reserves into a modern city increasingly committed to valuing and championing Aboriginal voices. In the process, it becomes clear that every small development was fought for and every change was fiercely debated. The Aboriginal community is no monolith and Andrews’ writing dispels that notion with a wealth of interviews and archival material. This is a book brimming with voices and rich with experience, especially Andrews’ own, growing up deeply embedded in a community that was committed to its own advocacy on every front.

Indeed, Andrews’ book answers the question of its own title with a sense of emphatic celebration: community is all around, whether in the early organisations that arranged days of mourning and set up educational institutions and medical services or in the broader pan-Aboriginal connections that define contemporary Melbourne. Culturally informed playgroups lay foundations that make kids into activists, while Aboriginal people living on the street enjoy their own sense of solidarity as ‘parkies’. There is community everywhere Andrews looks, but crucially it only exists thanks to the tireless work of Aboriginal Melburnians past and present – something absolutely worth acknowledging.