"Where the Rivers Meet" is a remarkable anthology of poems, stories, photographs and essays from Australia that speak powerfully to modern Hawai'i. Its 28 contributors are Aborigines and culturally integrated whites whose temper, rebellious anger and commitment to the recovery of ancient traditions relentlessly evoke Hawai'i's sovereignty movement. Their tone and sense of 'aina are disturbingly familiar — the cry of the dispossessed fused with the spirit of retrieval and repossession.

These writers love their land. Their quest is for a renewal of old ecologies and visceral relationships with the soil, a quest symbolized by Robyn Davidson, a westernized Aborigine who in 1977 made her way by foot clear across Australia, nearly 2,000 miles. Her essay, "Walk My Land," describes how frightening and empty the continent seemed at first, but quickly "turned into the original garden (i.e., Eden) as soon as I learnt to be in it." The experience was transforming: "Some part of me never returned from that journey. ... One version of me attends literary events in London; the other belongs in the wilderness."

In "Not Quite White in the Head" Melissa Lucashenko describes a similar drive for recovery, and calls the urge to talk of it "earthspeaking." She fully understands what native Australians have in common with their brothers and sisters elsewhere: "We aboriginal peoples around the globe identify ourselves primarily by the landscapes we call home. ... The pedagogies of the generations are contained not in human language alone, but also in language expressed within and by landscape."

John Jenkins picks up the theme in his poem "Skyline, Burwood, 1954": "Our lives shimmered in this stardust," while in "Dunes," Louise Crisp gives the sentiment a tragic edge:

I grieve in the dunes / Their shelter, their perfect windswept lines ... / The dunes give back to me as grief.

The villains in this drama are of course the Europeans, especially the English, who in 1788 first came to Australia in the form of Capt. James Cook and his crew. Afterwards, they literally turned the continent into a jail. From the Aborigine standpoint, the whole project was and is a disaster. "The white man acts as though he is the only one on the land," mutters a character in an extract from Larissa Behrendt's novel "Home," "and as if it is his ancestors who inhabit the landscape." Lucashenko repeats an overheard conversation: "It's so beautiful around here," says a white man to his native companion, "so green and quiet and lush." "Yeah," comes the bitterly humorous reply, "that's why your mob stole it."

In "Where the Rivers Meet," whites tend to be collectively and rather contemptuously spoken of as "tourists." It's not just that they have taken the land from its true owners but that they neither respect nor understand their prize. Davidson describes a visit to Emily Gap, a native site rich in petroglyphs. One portrays a woman engaged in an act of mysterious significance. While Davidson puzzles over it, "some tourists wander in with cameras. They stand in front of the ancestral woman and photograph her, then turn away without really looking. One of them says, 'I guess they doodled like that because they were bored.' "

But not all Australia's "tourists" are so ignorant, nor is their contribution casually dismissed. Later Davidson watches a group's riveted attention to Billy, a native guide, retelling an ancestral tale. "And watching their curiosity, admiration and excitement ... makes me seriously rethink my attitude towards tourism. This one afternoon has done more to educate and enthrall this little gathering of strangers than reading a dozen anthropological texts."

As this suggests, not everything in "Where the Rivers Meet" is lamentation. There are also amusing, cleverly observed short stories, especially Tony Birch's "The Bulldozer," about the demolition of an old home, and Delia Falconer's hilarious and touching "Republic of Love," the tale of a prostitute who discovers love unexpectedly in the arms of a client.

Even funnier is the extract from Vivienne Cleven's neatly written novel "Bitin' Back," in which a young man awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a homosexual. Like Kafka's Gregor Samsa, who turns into a giant insect overnight, his own reaction ("Can ya wake up gay?") and the horror of his mother and her pot-smoking boyfriend, leads to a richly tragi-comic series of events that make one want to read the rest of the story.

"Where the Rivers Meet" also contains a number of beautiful and evocative photographs by Ricky Maynard, and a poem about Hana, Maui, by Mark Tredinnick. It includes the lines: "If this is heaven, / Send me home." Tredinnick prefers Australia, which "burns / like Hell." Poetry aside, most of us would probably reply: "You're welcome."