Meet the Authors Behind Warra Warra Wai
2025 ACT Book of the Year
Join Darren Rix and Craig Cormick, winners of the ACT Book of the Year Award 2025, for an author talk on their book Warra Warra Wai.
2-3pm Saturday 7 February 2026
Civic Library, London Circuit, Canberra
This acclaimed book, offers a powerful and collaborative First Nations perspective on the arrival of James Cook and its ongoing impact. Through thoughtful storytelling and deep cultural insight, the authors encourage readers to reflect on history, identity, and the ways our shared past continues to shape the present.
Everyone is welcome to be part of this meaningful conversation.
Free Event: Registration is required
Both 250 years late, and extremely timely, this is an account of what First Nations people saw and felt when James Cook navigated their shores in 1770. We know the European story from diaries, journals and letters. For the first time, this is the other side. Who were the people watching the Endeavour sail by? How did they understand their world and what sense did they make of this strange vision? And what was the impact of these first encounters with Europeans? The answers lie in tales passed down from 1770 and in truth-telling of the often more brutal engagements that followed.
Darren Rix and his co-author Craig Cormick travelled to all the places on the east coast that were renamed by Cook, and listened to people’s stories. With their permission, these stories have been woven together with the European accounts and placed in their deeper context: the places Cook named already had names; the places he ‘discovered’ already had peoples and stories stretching back before time; and although Cook sailed on, the empire he represented impacted the people’s lives and lands immeasurably in the years after.
Darren Rix, a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man with Ngarigo bloodlines, has worked as a radio reporter for the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association, and with the Ngunnawal people as a cultural sites officer in Canberra. Darren is an accomplished musician, as was his uncle, Archie Roach.
Dr Craig Cormick OAM is an award-winning author and science communicator. He has been Chair of the ACT Writers Centre (now MARION ACT), co-host of the literary podcast Secrets from the Green Room, and has edited several magazines and books. He is drawn to stories of people whose voices have been hidden from history.