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Spot on, Stephjk. I'm so glad you thought as highly of the book on a second reading.
Welcome to the Literary Book Club ClareK, and I hope you try us again even though you found this book too bleak. It is grim, but I guess we have to face up to the bad parts of our history as well as celebrating the good parts. In the past what was seen as good and heroic was normally the only part of our history since colonisation that was talked about. So much was swept under the carpet. The impression given when I was taught Australian history was that the Aboriginal people were incapable of resistance or anything else. They weren't really worth a mention.
Another example of the dishonesties of the past: when I was a kid going to Sunday School, I remember there used to be special collections made to be sent to look after all the Aboriginal orphans in homes in various parts of Australia. Now of course I know that they weren't orphans at all, but members of the stolen generations, taken from their families because they were of mixed race. (We learned that practice from the US, which did the same with mixed race Native Americans.)
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