'Historians looking at Aborigines in the pastoral industry are generally obliged to opt, in their final analyses, for one of two positions. Stated simply, one emphasizes the external relations of brute colonialism under which Aborigines were exploited, ill-treated and powerless, reluctantly maintained on the stations at minimal standards by employers dependent on their labour but contemptuous of them. The other emphasizes the world that station blacks constructed for themselves within this introduced regime, at once achieving a new self-esteem as indispensable and skilled workers, and maintaining a protected space of traditional continuities. Born in the Cattle is the most thorough exposition yet of the latter view.' (Introduction)
