AustLit

'Rosalind Kidd's singularly important history of the administration of Aboriginal Affairs in Queensland seeks to range "beyond the conventional repression/liberation frameworks which have dominated aboriginal studies during the last twenty years". Kidd doesn't want to think of government as an "effect of ideology" where different institutions - church, state, health, media etc. - all run the same repressive racist line. Rather, the picture of government that emerges in this work is a picture of liberal government in the widest sense: government as a site of the formation, administration and problematisation of various objects (in this instance "aboriginal population") as well as government as a kind of brokering agency, an institution that negotiates with and trades off the various competing interest groups who are constituted as "stake-holders" in relation to those objects of governance.' (Introduction) 

'Signing off on his meditation on time and change, Alan Frost describes his Melbourne garden, where plants from Far North Queensland are the remainder and reminder of his childhood home. Frost's 'dreaming' takes him back to his origins but this experience confirms loss as much as it supplies completion. His narrative restages a series of returns and exposes a longing or regret for the love which 'leads us to endure'. This book is a braided narrative: a personal memoir interwoven with, and occasionally unravelling from, a more variegated history of the 'East Coast Country' named by the poet Val Vallis. The writing attempts to redeem the sense of separation and loss, the homesickness, which pervades Frost's personal story; more problematically its dreaming stakes a wider claim to this country.' (Introduction) 

'There is, in Australian writing, a distinguished tradition of the 'true life story'. At its best, this genre entices the reader into the world of the narrator to enjoy a good yam which also functions as a form of history. But there are pitfalls too - the most common, in Australian writing, being an unrelenting cheerfulness which razes the more complex emotions which one ardently hopes the author experienced in 'real life' . Events do not speak for themselves: concealing the psyche and eschewing the passions deprives the 'true life story' of much of its raison d'etre.' (Introduction)