Douglas Bird

I may have selected this book due to McCarthy's recent death; but the work is never far from my mind. I heard the news of his death June 13 this year when I was on my way to the remote Aboriginal community where I work in Australia's Western Desert. Coincidentally I first read the book 23 years ago on my very first trip to Aboriginal Australia. For me the work is a vivid description of settler colonialism's unrelenting hellscape in remote Indigenous lands. I hope it is a cautionary tale.