'This book is an excellent and accessibly written local history of the 20 years following the celebrated 1960s Wave Hill Walk-off. Perhaps surfing – as much as creating – an attitudinal shift in the mainstream Australian community, the Gurindji Walk- off came to symbolise Aboriginal resistance to oppressions as well as persistence in the face of hostility from powerful establishment interests. Elements of the non- Aboriginal Australian community (some unions, some activists and eventually the Labor Party) accepted this Indigenous aspiration and allied with the Gurindji. A wave of support promised to realise the Gurindji’s dreams. Aspirational purity was then overgrown and stunted by some political hostility allied with much more bureaucratic incapacity and incoherence. Ward is a historian who was peripherally involved in the events he describes, although he is generally even-handed in his assessments. He introduces the usual characters of settlement politics, bickering activists, robber opportunists and passing bureaucrats that still interpose between the Aboriginal people of northern Australia and the state. After the post–walk off struggle, the Gurindji themselves started to divide, so that the dreams of the old heroes of the 1960s began to be less important as social change hit their community, as it did similar communities across remote Australia.'
