Tag Archives: Sarah Maddison

Books I read in April [2007]

Posted on 7 Aug 2025 | Leave a comment

[7 August 2025: I’ve retrieved this post from my old blog because I’m currently reading a book by Geoff Page, and Lawrie & Shirley, reviewed here, is the only other book by him I’ve read since I started blogging]

Clive Hamilton & Sarah Maddison, Silencing Dissent (Allen & Unwin 2007)
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1949)
Tim Baker (editor), Waves: great stories from the surf (HarperCollins 2005)
Geoff Page, Lawrie & Shirley: the final cadenza (Pandanus Poetry 2006)
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (Pan Macmillan Australia 2006)
Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing (Viking 2006)
Heat 13: Harper’s Gold (starting)
Harold Bloom’s Best Poems (continuing)

dissent

Gillian Leahy’s movie Our Park has a special place in my heart because the park in question is my local park. But it’s got an even stronger hold on my affections because of its uncomfortable, even gruelling depiction of democracy in action. As they struggle over what use should be made of a little patch of semi-derelict land, people disagree passionately, at times (off camera) come to blows, and (on camera) declare intense animosity for each other. But things are thrashed out. Many points of view are heard. Everyone owns the final result.

That’s not how democracy works in Prime Minister John w Howard’s Australia. People do get beaten up, of course, mostly off camera and with a legal requirement not to talk about it. But disagreement with the government’s policies doesn’t get much of a look-in. Silencing Dissent is a chilling look at the way dissenting voices have been systematically intimidated, bribed, excluded, marginalised or drowned out over the last decade or so. It lists the democratic institutions that have been undermined: the media, the senate, non-government organisations, intelligence and defence services, the public service, universities. Because it’s a book of essays all making the same point, there’s quite a bit of overlap and repetition, but for slow learners like me that’s all to the good. A young friend of mine is fond of saying that the Coalition are Fascists (he intends the term precisely) and that only cowardice stops people from saying so; the detail accumulated in this book makes him seem less hyperbolic.

wblood

To cheer myself up I moved on to a bit of fiction by Flannery O’Connor. I hope that sentence doesn’t make her turn in her grave, but paradoxically there is something cheering about Wise Blood. It reads to me as if it was written in a trance – as if some twisted angel had dictated it and the young Ms O’Connor just wrote it down, trusting it would amount to something. Most of its characters are all ‘a little bit off their heads’ and some are a big bit off the rails. Hazel Motes, played by Brad Dourif in the John Huston movie which I plan to watch again on DVD soon, is in obsessive revolt against the punitive and repressive Christianity of his childhood, and burns with an evangelical imperative to preach a Church of Christ without Christ (I would have said cacangelical but the word doesn’t seem to exist).

I remember reading a review of the movie that compared Hazel to the Monty Python character who was trying to train ravens to fly underwater. That comparison captures the bleak comedy of the book, but leaves out the appalling sense of waste and, in the end, awe that Hazel inspires. Flannery O’Connor was a Catholic living in the southern US. The characters in this book are all Protestant. Maybe she’s observing them from the other side of a sectarian fence and seeing them as wildly deluded, but the pervasive sense of intractable mystery, of not-knowing, and the lack of overt authorial commentary, makes a sectarian reading seem wide of the mark. I finished the last page with a sense that I’d been taken somewhere dark, weird and scarily believable.

waves

I read Waves as research for work. It reminded me in a roundabout way of an early review of David Williamson’s play The Removalists. As you probably know, in the course of that play, a man – Kenny – is terrorised and beaten up by two policemen. The review I’m thinking of by the late, magisterial H. G. Kippax, found fault with many aspects of the play, including the victimised man being described as a typesetter: according to Kippax, typesetters were not working-class yobbos like Kenny, but quirky individuals who were forever surprising their acquaintances with odd snippets of information. It came with the territory, you see: according to Harry, typesetters read much more widely, if also more shallowly, than normal people who weren’t handling other people’s words for their entire working lives. Like those possibly mythical beings, I often find myself acquiring information about the most unlikely subjects. Waves introduced me to a new world of specialised language: technical language for describing waves and related phenomena (lefties, beachbreaks, righties, peaks and barrels); jargon associated with surfing equipment and practice (coaming, mals, floaters, nosedives, guns); and the argot of the surfing culture, which includes but is not limited to the other two (groms, kahunas, charging and stoked).

The bit I enjoyed most was grand old champion surfer Nat Young’s 1974 encounter with Patrick White (whom Tim Baker describes disarmingly as a ‘gay literary luminary’). After Young is quoted as saying how important The Tree of Man had been to him, we are given this glimpse of Patrick White as filtered through a surfer sensibility:

This unlikely pair discovered they had a connection that went back twenty-five years. ‘He was living down at Werri at that stage, him and his boyfriend, and they were very much in love and they used to spend a lot of time walking on the beach. He said he used to watch surfing and watch waves. Werri, from my childhood, was very important because there was a golf club and it was abandoned and we used to go in and just stay there. And Patrick understood. He said, “Oh, we used to laugh about the way the golf club had turned into a derelict place and the surfers were squatting there on the weekends.” So he knew exactly where my head was at.’

lawrie

Lawrie & Shirley was a birthday present from my niece Paula.

Somewhere along the line I’ve absorbed, without really noticing it, the notion that poetry should be difficult – if it’s not difficult it’s doggerel; almost: if it rhymes and has a sense of humour, it must be bad. Not that I hold these assertions to be true, but they have insinuated themselves into my brain. But hell, if Lawrie and Shirley is doggerel, then let’s have lots more.

It’s a rhyming narrative, ‘A Movie in Verse’, about a relationship between a man in his early eighties and a woman who’s not a lot younger. Each of its 47 ‘scenes’ opens with screenplay-style directions of the ‘INTERIOR. DAY’ variety, and the story progresses mainly through visuals and dialogue. It’s light, funny, has an unsurprising range of characters (middle-aged children who see their inheritances threatened, disapproving former friends, etc), and manages to feel like an enjoyable romantic comedy, albeit a geriatric one. The great fear that hangs over the characters isn’t death – everyone knows that death isn’t far off – but disability, and more specifically dementia. I wouldn’t say it’s a major focus, but it crops up from time to time. Like this, where Shirley takes Lawrie to visit her aunt Ida in a nursing home – also a nice example of how the jolly dump-de-dum of the tetrameters can tilt over into genuine pathos:

Shirley looks around the room,
trying to locate the smile

she'll recognise as Auntie Ida's.
And finds her after quite a while

away off in a distant corner,
wasting quietly in a chair,

doing absolutely nothing,
no recognition in her stare;

no smile, no words like 'Hello, Shirley';
no formula like 'Hello, dear'.

Shirley stoops to take her hand
and, fighting back a hidden tear,

sighs to Lawrie, close beside her,
'There's no one in there any more.'

Eventually, they turn about
and walk back down the corridor.

Cross-fade to a final shot
of Ida's vacant, lunar face,

a kind of undiscovered planet
staring coldly into space.
thief

The Book Thief, another birthday present, is a terrific read. I guess it’s a YA title, though some of those famously nervous school libraries might have trouble with the swearing – even though it’s in German, it’s all meticulously translated. The action of the story takes place in a small community near Munich during the Second World War, and is narrated by Death, who doesn’t enjoy his work, is deeply curious about human beings and charmed by them even in the middle of the immense overwork of that period.

Such dark material, but delivered with delicacy, affection and even lightness. Some elements of the presentation might seem irritatingly tricksy to some readers, but they worked fine for me as something like aeration. There are two or three short books, lyrical graphic novels you might call them, within the book, and every now and then a short piece of text is separated from the body and printed in bold type with its own little heading: a key piece of dialogue, some background information on a character, statistics on parts of the war. I read a review somewhere online taking the book to task for trying to exculpate the German people over the murder of the Jews: that’s absolutely not how I read it. These are recognisably human people. They love their children; some take actions, small or huge, against the prevailing Nazis; all of them, willingly or by cruel force of circumstance, are complicit; and all of them suffer. The book has won awards, and it deserved them.

longing

Leonard Cohen’s book is a weirdly mixed bag. There are some memorable serious poems, introspective and embarrassingly honest; and one or two witty throwaways. There are the lyrics of songs, several of which are on his 2004 album, Dear Heather (I’ve just listened to them, and they’re fabulous as songs). But too much of it reads like excerpts from his notebooks – whingeing effusions about being fat, old, failing in love and as a monk, past his prime as poet and singer if he ever had a prime – adorned by innumerable variations on the same gloomy charcoal self-portrait, most of them accompanied by gnomic handwritten annotation. My sense is that if Leonard Cohen wasn’t a celebrity this book wouldn’t have seen the light of day, or at least would have been a much slimmer volume. I suppose we should be grateful that his celebrity status derives largely from his writing! The longing of the book’s title is everywhere, shot through with despair. Frankly, as a preacher in a Peter Cook sketch once said about sex and violence in the movies, we get enough of that at home. When the poem ‘Titles’ asked me:

and now Gentle Reader
in what name
in whose name
do you come
to idle with me
in these luxurious
and dwindling realms
of Aimless Privacy?

I was tempted to reply, ‘G-d alone knows.’ It’s a beautifully produced book, feels good in the hand, and there are some very good things in it. Deeply committed fans will almost certainly love it. I think his editor has let him – and us – down.

bloom

Sporadically I continue my way through the Bloom book: Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll made the cut, and make strange bedfellows indeed with Yeats, Hardy and the guy who wrote ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ (‘I have been faithful to you, Cynara, in my fashion’). In his commentary, Harold does seem to like letting us know about intimate or passionate relationships poets have with people of the same gender.

heat13

I’ve just started the Heat. Gillian Mears has multiple sclerosis, and some years ago had an unrelated, horrific medical crisis that brought her close to death. When she was securely back from the brink, she bought an old ambulance and set off on a solitary adventure, driving and camping solo for many months. Her account of it is the first article in this issue, and it makes me hope that she has a book in mind: there are Walden-ish moments in the New South Wales bush, House MD-ish urgencies, a beautiful rendering of the way a mind does unexpected things in crisis …

 

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Sarah Maddison’s Beyond White Guilt

Posted on 25 Oct 2011 | Leave a comment

Sarah Maddison, Beyond White Guilt: The real challenge for Black–White relations in Australia (Allen & Unwin 2011)

I’ve been having trouble blogging about this book – maybe I would have been better off writing one of those ‘X reads Y’ series of posts that take you through the book along with the blogger over the days or weeks it takes to read it. There was hardly a page when my mind wasn’t firing off in many directions, excited by one idea, quarrelling with another, irritated by an elliptical use of a reference, challenged and provoked and challenged again. But here you are, just one little blog post.

The book starts brilliantly. While strolling around her inner city suburb the author sees on the bank of the polluted and deformed Cooks River a tiny space that she imagines to be pretty much unchanged in the 200 and more years since white settlement. She pictures a group of people of the Eora nation going about their lives there, and is shocked by the mental image, not because it is new or surprising, but because she realises ‘that [she] had allowed [her] consciousness of that reality to fade.’ She goes on, ‘Unlike Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, I could choose to “forget” or to deny or repress the reality of my place here.’

Such moments must have been experienced by every thoughtful non-Indigenous Australian – moments when, in shocking contrast to our habitual complacency, it becomes blindingly clear that our current lives rest on a history of colonial invasion and dispossession. Recounting this example in the Introduction implies a promise that the next 200 or so pages will unpack such moments: How and why does that forgetting happen? What would happen if we stopped ‘forgetting’ and began to live in the real world? How do we go about making that change? Is this a thing that we need to address as so many million individuals, is there a challenge we need to meet collectively, and if both how are they connected?

Coming from the author of Black Politics, a powerful account of the main themes and tensions in Aboriginal politics based on extensive interviews with a range of Aboriginal leaders, this implied promise feels anything but hollow.

I’m not confident that I can summarise the book’s argument adequately, but here goes:

  • When the British arrived on the continent of Australia in the late 18th century, they wanted the land, and took it, with devastating consequences for the people who were already living here. Some people baulk at calling what happened genocide, but it’s hard to see how that word is far off the mark.
  • As the Australian nation formed, and people took on the  Australian national identity, they needed stories of the nation’s origin that would allow them to feel good about themselves and the identity. Stories were told of pioneers’ hardihood, of Anzac larrikin heroism, of sporting accomplishments. The history of European–Aboriginal relations was marginalised or silenced. This version of national identity became entrenched both in public institutions and in people’s minds.
  • The objective reality is that all non-Indigenous Australians continue to benefit from the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continue to struggle with the consequences of the huge and ongoing assault on their ancestors, their cultures and their communities.
  • We know this. We mostly ignore it, but we know it. [This has to be very confusing for us as children: the stories are told and discounted in the same breath.] This is a kind of anaesthesia, a dissociative story we tell ourselves.
  • To break through that anaesthesia and face the reality of our history involves emotional discomfort. Unless we face this discomfort we’re likely to either a) see the problem (if we admit there is one) as inherent to Aboriginal and Torres Strait cultures and so none of our business, or b) intervene in ways that  don’t challenge the assumptions that allowed the past and ongoing injustices to happen in the first place. [Her discussion of the Intervention is compelling.] Either way, we continue to live in a strange, dissociated state.
  • What has to change is us.
  • Real, effective change isn’t impossible. Australian history is full of examples. [She discusses  the 1967 referendum, the Reconciliation process of the 1990s, and the Sorry Books and the apology for the Stolen Generations.]
  • So what is to be done? We need a difficult conversation about remembering and forgetting. We need dialogue – as opposed to debate or just conversation – in which [I’m quoting Boori Pryor, not anyone in this book] ‘we see your tears, you see our tears’. We need to acknowledge our [now I’m quoting Sarah Maddison] ‘bonds of solidarity with the perpetrators of historical and human injustice’, and find a way to break them, that is, ‘to rethink who we are as a nation’.
  • ‘Relationships will be central to whatever path lies ahead’. An immediate opportunity is the referendum coming up in 2112 to include an acknowledgement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution.

It’s an important subject, and an important book. When you read it you may find my summary inadequate, and if so you’ll get no quarrel from me. The fact is, I found the argument hard to follow. My best guess as to why is that there are actually two books here struggling to co-exist. One is the one I’ve tried to summarise above. The other is a companion volume to Black Politics, which acknowledges and synthesises a vast body of thinking in a range of disciplines that addresses the issues of racism, colonisation and collective guilt. Notes and the bibliography account for nearly a quarter of the book’s pages. The text is studded with rich, provocative quotes, but at times it feels that no phrase, no concept can be used without deference to its originator. This may be sound academic practice, but the effect – at least for my kind of reader – is that hardly any time at all goes by without someone identified as political scientist A, legal scholar B, anti-racism educator C, political psychologist D, historian E … the list goes on … popping up, throwing a couple of words into the ring and then disappearing. I’d be going, ‘Who was that talking head? What  context did they use that phrase in?’ I would rather have read an overview of the scholarship,  White Politics, perhaps, and then moved on to Sarah Maddison’s argument. Or perhaps this is just a longwinded way of saying I found the scholarly apparatus distracting here.

Another reason for my difficulty is confusion about the word guilt. You’ll notice I haven’t used it in my summary. Is guilt a feeling or a legal verdict? Does it refer to a subjective state or a collective condition, or a vertigo-inducing combination? It seems to me that there are a number of quite distinct things rolled together in the one term here.

You can see Sarah Maddison speaking loud and clear in her own voice in a talk given at the Wheeler Centre here. I recommend it.

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Beyond White Guilt at Gleebooks

Posted on 2 Jun 2011 | Leave a comment

Last night we cashed in a couple of our Gleeclub vouchers to hear Sarah Maddison in conversation with Jeff McMullen about the former’s new book, Beyond White Guilt. A couple of years ago, Sarah’s Black Politics drew on interviews with 30 Aboriginal leaders to give a kind of map of Aboriginal politics (the link is to my blog entry, which outlines some of salient points on the map). This book could be seen as a sequel, looking at non-Indigenous Australians.

A quick look at Wikipedia’s entry on Jeff McMullen shows him to be an eminently qualified whitefella to converse on this subject. He kicked off the conversation with two lists: on the one hand, invasion, dispossession, genocide, stealing children, and on the other denial, loss of memory and guilt. ‘We struggle in Australia,’ he said at one stage, ‘to have an honest and direct conversation [about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians].’ This conversation was refreshingly free of indirection or quibble. I won’t try to summarise, but can offer a couple of notes.

Asked why she chose to focus on guilt, which is after all often a useless, self-punishing emotion, Sarah Maddison cited Bernhard Schlink’s Guilt About the Past which argues in the German context that every generation that doesn’t make a substantive break with the atrocities of its forebears is standing in solidarity with them. Her book doesn’t advocate that non-Indigenous Australians should wallow in guilt forevermore, but that we should ‘sit with’ our guilt for a time, not run from it either by taking action or by denial. Facing that discomfort is a necessary step to understanding and making thoughtful progress. [I liked this. I know a Native American woman who urges non-Indigenous people to put our minds to answering the question, ‘How have I personally benefited from genocide?’]

She talked about ‘high-identifiers’ – people for whom it is extremely difficult to acknowledge any negative dimensions to their national identity. Such people tend to think that the continuing disadvantage of Aboriginal people must be their fault, specifically must be because there’s something wrong with Aboriginal culture. She talked about the need for adaptive change, the kind of change that requires a change of perspective rather than a technological fix.

The questions were all excellent. Perhaps for the first time in my life I heard a very long question that was neither primarily self-promoting nor bizarrely tangential to the topic in hand. The questioner spoke of the problematic nature of the phrase ‘white guilt’ both because non-Indigenous Australia is very diverse, and ‘white’ covers only part of it, because the ‘we’ who actually experience guilt, as opposed to, say, denial, is very hard to define (is it only liberals?), and because guilt is a pretty dead-end notion anyway. These were interesting issues to raise, and, as Sarah Maddison acknowledged, weren’t going to be resolved in an hour before dinner on a Friday night.

No doubt I’ll blog about this again when I read the book.

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Conversations while reading while walking

Posted on 16 Nov 2009 | 4 comments

I’ve posted about these brief conversations before, and they continue to amuse and even fascinate me. How much can be communicated in the time it takes to pass a friend, neighbour or stranger in the street! The conversation en passant is an under-appreciated artform.

So here are a couple that have accumulated over the last couple of weeks.

Neighbour: (beaming) Jonathan, every time I see you you’re reading. I wish it would rub off. It’s years since I’ve read anything.
Me: It’s not always serious stuff, you know. (Though I was reading Sarah Maddison’s Black Politics, which is surely serious enough for anyone.)
—–
A non-conversation that fits here anyhow: I actually saw someone else in the Taylor Street Park reading while walking, accompanied by a dog. We didn’t acknowledge each other, and I didn’t get close enough to see what she was reading. It had an orange cover.
—–
This one could have happened whether I was reading or not (I was wearing my red Viva-the-Kevolution shirt – a red version of this one, not this one):

Silver-haired man outside Glebe library: I’m not talking to you! (When I took no notice, being about 20 metres away) Hey, man in the red shirt … I’m not talking to you! (As I look up from my book and acknowledge him) I’ve got ADHD and I’m disciplining myself not to talk to everyone who walks past, so I’m not talking to you.
Me: (somewhat absent-mindedly) Oh, OK, thanks. (Now more like 30 metres from him, I return to my book.)
Silver-haired man: (calling cheerfully) I’m a little disappointed in your response. It would have been better if you’d said. ‘Now I’ll never know what I’m missing out on,’ or something like that.
Me: (closing my book, turning to face him, but not retracing my steps) Of course, I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.
Silver-haired man: You see how needy I am!
Me: You’ll do.

My guess is that this charming man has been convinced  by a well meaning psychiatrist / psychologist that his ‘inappropriate’ gregarious impulses constitute a disorder.
—–

More of these conversations as they occur. I do get a lot of indulgent smiles, and I’m not including dog-psychology haiku chats

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Black Politics: behind the news

Posted on 24 Oct 2009 | 1 comment

Sarah Maddison, Black Politics: inside the complexity of Aboriginal political culture (Allen & Unwin 2009)

Sarah Maddison is a non-Indigenous Australian academic. Over five years, she interviewed 30 Aboriginal leaders, activists and public intellectuals, ‘discussing their life histories, their political views, their worries and their aspirations’. Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Michael Mansell declined to be interviewed, but the actual cast of characters is very impressive, ranging over all mainland states and including household names as well as people who work at the community level, far from the limelight.

Starting from these interviews and drawing on very wide reading (the bibliography runs to 30 pages), while ‘privileging’ the voices of the interviewed and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait people (emphatically including the three who declined to be interviewed), Maddison constructs a kind of map, mainly for whitefella readers, of the complexity of Aboriginal politics. A reading-while-walking conversation helped me to think a little more about the idea of the book as a map. A park friend commented knowingly, ‘I would have thought that was more for dipping into than reading straight through.’ She’s partly right: the book could serve as a reference. But it is a map, not a street directory, so it also makes good sense to get the whole picture by reading it straight through.

Maddison gives a lightning-quick survey of the history of government policy (violent dispossession, ‘protection’, ‘assimilation’, ‘self-determination’, ‘intervention’) and Aboriginal responses from the beginnings of the colonies, but the book is about living politics, and so deals mainly with the Howard years and their dark shadow, in which we still live. While there is some attention to personalities – Noel Pearson, for example, emerges as a man most people love to hate, or at least contend with – our attention is drawn to ten ‘key areas of tension’. Here they are, with a little taster from each chapter to give you a clue on how the tension plays out:

Autonomy and dependency

In every country where Indigenous people have been subjected to a colonial regime, precolonial autonomy has been eroded. In its place a range of damaging dependencies have manifested themselves. These postcolonial dependencies add complexity to Aboriginal political culture as individuals, families and communities struggle to regain their autonomy as self-determining peoples and as political actors. These struggles take place in political contexts that tend to necessitate at least some degree of dependence on non-Indigenous structures of government.

Sovereignty and citizenship

Are Aboriginal people citizens of Australia or members of sovereign Indigenous nations? The nation-state of Australia may have sovereign legitimacy in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of many of its Indigenous inhabitants it remains an illegitimate interloper on their territory, still trying after 220 years to usurp a sovereignty that they have never ceded.

Tradition and development

Without an economic base, Aboriginal people cannot be autonomous. Not surprisingly, however, there are complexities that get in the way of economic development for Aboriginal people. One is […] the tension between need for economic development and the importance of traditional connections to land.

Individualism and collectivism

Aboriginal value systems are often at odds with liberal democratic philosophy, creating tension between those committed to ideas of individual political equality and those who maintain that the foundational unit of society is the Aboriginal group or community.

Indigeneity and hybridity

The idea of “Aboriginal” or “Indigenous” identity is a distinctly postcolonial construct invented to both name and contain the “natives” of terra australis. In light of this, there is immense complexity concerning questions of Aboriginal identity today. […] Both non-Aboriginal politicians and, at times, other Aboriginal people will question an Aboriginal leader’s racial credentials on the suspicion that they may not be “Indigenous enough”.

Unity and regionalism

Attempting to organise political representation at the national level thus risks obscuring the diversity of Aboriginal nations and community groups, leaving many feeling invisible or unrepresented. This emphasis on localism can make national unity seem fragile or even impossible. In the absence of a credible model of national political representation, however, there can be tension between Aboriginal groups and communities who may find themselves competing for recognition and entitlements.

Community and kin

[The] majority of Aboriginal communities are a fiction, or at least a creation, comprising a number of kinship groups that, prior to colonisation, would have occupied different territories and that in many cases still retain different languages and systems of law.

Elders and the next generation:

Aboriginal political culture is still based on a gerontocracy in which elders command the most potent authority and influence. elders are holders of special and sacred cultural knowledge, and it is their responsibility to hand this knowledge down to the younger generations. The breakdown of traditional authority structures, however, means that this transfer of knowledge can no longer be assumed In place of this hierarchy of cultural seniority, younger leaders now emerge from the ranks of political activists fro community organisations, and from the developing class of young, university-educated professionals.

Men, women and customary law:

Colonisation has interrupted the inevitable evolution of Aboriginal custom and belief, instead pushing Aboriginal people to defend their threatened culture. At the same time there has been an extensive but poorly informed public debate about the recognition of customary law that has done much to muddy the water and demonise Aboriginal men.

Mourning and reconciliation:

The traumas of colonisation, including massacre, rape, starvation and introduced diseases through to policies that justified the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, are not resolved.

The author doesn’t keep her own mind out of the telling. She has struggled to do more than simply present the variety of Aboriginal viewpoints, which might have been useful to dip into but very hard to read. In general she has done a hugely impressive job of shaping her vast material into a narrative / argument. Occasionally there’s a sentence that strikes a chill. For example, when one reads, ‘What is almost universally rejected by Aboriginal leaders and activists, however, is the use of customary law to defend violent and abusive behaviour, particularly that directed at women and children,’ one does wonder what unspoken murk hides behind that ‘almost’. And, as the endnotes acknowledge, some complexities are simply not discussed – Torres Strait Islanders are generally not present, for instance. But a book that tackled this subject and didn’t have loose threads or unaddressed areas would be a miracle, and very very big.

I heard Sarah Maddison on Radio National saying that she wrote this book largely because of her love for Australia. Though this statement may have been in part a preemptive defence against imagined attacks from the weirdly patriotic right, on the evidence of the book itself it was also the plain truth. The book is the labour of an engaged, committed mind, and I for one am grateful for it.

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