I asked myself once too often why I was continuing to read this book when it was giving me nothing in return? And when nobody failed to answer me, again and again, I finally said enough of this and put the book down for good. It is my hope that somebody else can get from this what I could not. But unless you are an interested party in Aboriginal life and history in Australia then I shall carry my doubts with me. The book became too much of a burden to me so I set my load down among these quiet stones. As boring as these pieces proved to be I cannot imagine his fiction to be as good as reported by respected others. At least not for me. ( )

This drew contradictory responses from me. On the one hand, I was irritated by regular occurrences of a kind of over-writing, a reaching for literary effect in place of considered argument, and on the other I was deeply appreciative of its depiction of the complexities of life in northern and central Australia. It's a collection of short pieces -- there's no acknowledgment of previous publication, but even though there are strong thematic links the book feels, especially in the first sections, like a collection of articles rather than a unified whole. It's a thematically organised collage.

In the section 'The Lure of the North', which largely deals with non-Aboriginal people, there's a too-short piece on Ernest Giles, in which Rothwell describes the writings of the explorers as constituting Australia's profound home-grown nineteenth-century tradition ...: a long line of works, impassioned yet analytical accounts, journeys at once imaginative, intellectual and emotional, beginning with Edward John Eyre and Grey, reaching their midpoint with the Renaissance-accented Mitchell, before coming to a fierce, baroque crescendo with Giles and his successor, David Carnegie.'
He quotes Giles's wonderful account of himself devouring a tiny, life-saving kangaroo joey in the desert. He could have gone on to quote his description of Kata Djuta (as resembling a herd of pink elephants seen from behind) or his lament for the (he assumed) inevitable genocide of the Aborigines by a race 'more favoured than they'.

But the book's strength is in its engagement with Aboriginal issues. The section 'In the Shadows' comprises six essays on the people who continue to endure that genocide, including an account of the Northern Territory's horrific epidemic of kidney disease; a meditation on the dying off of Australian languages (languages with little or no written dimension really can die completely, taking whole worlds of understanding with them); a scarifying essay, 'The Perfect Trap', which foreshadowed the Little Children Are Sacred report and came close to foreshadowing the Howard government's precipitous response. Set against this grimness are portraits of healers, community leaders and, in particular, artists; and fascinating accounts of the art scene, including its recent corruption by greed and chicanery. I found myself wishing he could have drawn the threads of the book together, offered some unifying insight or argument. Instead, there's an epilogue which is is probably very good, but which I found difficult to read because of the aforementioned hi-falutin' literariness. (I think its main reflective gist is to question, in an introspective kind of way, why some non-Aboriginal people become fascinated by the desert and things Aboriginal). The book as a whole is impressive: clearly Rothwell has built solid relationships with a enormous range of people, exercising what Inga Clendinnen calls the outsider's profession, that of the journalist, with enough passion and persistence to have brought his readers very close to his chosen subject. ( )