Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact. Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy. In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia’s story can best be told.

Fictionalised account of punitive expeditions against Walbiri people led by Constable W.G. Murray and Nugget Morton; criticism of the affair by missionary Athol McGregor and Anne Locke; Darwin trial; recent interviews with Walbiri survivors by M. Hartwig, P. Read and P. Wafer.

Dank faces head on the ingrained racism, born of brutal practice and harsh legislation, that lies always under the skin of Australia … She describes sudden terrible violence, between races and sometimes at home. But overwhelmingly this is a book about strong, beloved parents and grandparents, guiding and teaching their children and grandchildren what country means, about joyful gatherings and the pleasures of eating food provided by the place that nourishes them, both spiritually and physically.