AustLit

'Eight or nine years ago I found myself thinking about the strangeness of a place in which I'd lived as a boy, strange in several ways, but most vividly because there, in Tennant Creek, unlike any other place in which I'd lived before or have lived in since, there were Aborigines. I knew almost nothing about them, either in general or in Tennant Creek in particular, and I began reading. Early on, and more or less by chance, I came across a slim volume titled After the Dreaming, by a W.E.H. Stanner, and picked it up simply because it wouldn't take long to read. That was a miscalculation of ignorance. Only three or four pages in I was already slowed by the force, density and passion of the argument. Soon I was reading line by line, word by word.' (Publication abstract)