Back in about 1990 the BBC News ran a short report about the Stolen Aboriginal Children of Australia. It’s the type of narrative that fascinates me, and I made a note of it in my stories to investigate file. I started to write a screenplay in about 1996, but decided that I really needed to go to Australia to do more research, and it would be better written as a novel.
I was living in Sydney, Australia in 2002, researching and writing the first draft of Secrets From The Dust when I heard that the film The Rabbit Proof Fence, about three Aboriginal girls snatched from their families, was coming out. I panicked, had someone gotten there before me? I went to watch the film at an Art Deco cinema on George Street. As I heard some in the audience crying, I was quite surprised. Were they aware that what they were watching was a sanitised version of what had really taken place, I asked myself. Had any of them read the firsthand accounts of some of the victims in the
Bringing Them Home Report? That experience and listening to the director of the film on TV a few days later explaining that he had made the film in the way he had in order not to put the audience off from going to see it, convinced me that Secrets From The Dust still needed to be told.
Whilst Secrets From The Dust seeks to entertain the reader, it also seeks to inform, and I feel it can only do so by dealing with the truth of what was taking place. To that extent it will take the reader to some uncomfortable
places, but redemption, if there is to be any, can only come from being fully aware of what the human race is capable of.
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George Hamilton
Browsing Rhino