Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs

Death and denial constituted two critical moments in the colonisation the north of Australia.

Denial persists today and engenders a complicity with all that has gone before. Whether denial takes the form of stride refusal or the more subtle form of blank indifference, the result is the same: the past is concealed, and the living become accomplices in the continuation of injustice.

This book unleashes that past and its concealment. You will find stories of massacres and murders, of working life on cattle stations, of friendships and foes, of bureaucratic machinations and the individual struggled of Aboriginal Australians.

There are elements to these stories which project them across time and space, culture and experience. They speak of exploitation and cruelty, but they also contain a message of hope. 

It is an Aboriginal message -- that we should manage our differences to our mutual benefit rather than to our destruction.