The Tears of Strangers

A moving story of growing up black.

Stan Grant was born in 1963 into the Wiradjuri people - a tribe of warriors who occupied the vast territory of central and south-western New South Wales. For 100 years the Wiradjuri waged a war against European invasion and settlement. This war has largely been ignored by historians and politicians but will be burnt into the minds and hearts of the Wiradjuri forever.

By the time Grant was born the war against invasion had largely been lost and remnants of the Wiradjuri scattered among mission camps and the fringes of rural towns. Now the Wiradjuri would find themselves waging a new war - this time against alcoholism, poverty, abuse and neglect. It was set against this backdrop that the Grant family waged its own struggle - a life and death struggle for survival.

In the 1980s Grant would begin a career in journalism that would take him to a position of national prominence. As a reporter he has travelled all over the world, interviewing the likes of Arafat, Clinton, Blair, Adams and Saddam. He has seen despots and tin-pot revolutionaries; madmen and saints; the glory of the Olympics and the despair of hundreds of years of conflict in Ireland and the Middle East.

And now he turns to the biggest story of his career: his own story and the story of his people, the story of the Wiradjuri.