His novel explicitly deals with the massacres of Aborigines by settlers. It was less successful than his earlier work, "partly because inferior, but also because he courageously and accurately portrayed horrific mass-murders of Aborigines by police and pastoralists. The public was not ready for such honesty."
Source: G. K. Jenkin, 'Newland, Simpson (1835–1925)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, Melbourne University Press, 1988, pp 10–12.
'Rebecca Forbes and Jim Page were English immigrants who lived and died amongst the Adnyamathanha people of the northern Flinders Ranges in the first half of the twentieth century. The first time I saw their two graves there - just the two of them, on their own up the hill, a little above the community at Nepabunna - I asked the obvious question: How did they come to be there? The journeys involved in these trajectories - immigration from England to Australia, migration from the coast to the inland - are the focus of this paper.' (Author's introduction, 149)
'Rebecca Forbes and Jim Page were English immigrants who lived and died amongst the Adnyamathanha people of the northern Flinders Ranges in the first half of the twentieth century. The first time I saw their two graves there - just the two of them, on their own up the hill, a little above the community at Nepabunna - I asked the obvious question: How did they come to be there? The journeys involved in these trajectories - immigration from England to Australia, migration from the coast to the inland - are the focus of this paper.' (Author's introduction, 149)
