"Black Gold" is an expansion of the earlier "Black Diamonds", with more recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sport stars feted and older, forgotten stars remembered. And, for such a small percentage of the Australian population, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders can lay claim to an extraordinary group of leading sportsmen and women, from the cricketers and runners of the nineteenth century, the boxers of the twentieth century through to tennis champs like Evonne Goolagong, Olympic gold medallists like Cathy Freeman and Nova Peris-Kneebone and footballers like Gavin Wanganeen, Polly Farmer and the Krakouer brothers.

The authors run through the athletes inducted into the Aboriginal and Islander Sports Hall of Fame, giving each a short biographical piece (in the course of doing this, supplying us with facts about the sprinter who invented the crouched start, the Melbourne Cup winning jockey who claimed he was Filipino so as to avoid the racism he believed he would face as an Aboriginal and the "mysterious" former Test cricketer the authors claim is Aboriginal.

This is well worth a read and I hope this book is further expanded (perhaps titled "Black Platinum") in the near future to include mentions of the new generation of Indigenous Australian rules footballers, cricketers, boxers and other myriad sport stars. ( )