I wish to thank the Australia Council for the generous grant of a two-year fellowship during the writing of this book.
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my friends Frank Budby, elder of the Barada people, and Col McLennan, elder of the Jangga, and to Liz Hatté, for their encouragement and enthusiasm during the writing not only of this book but also of my earlier novel, Journey to the Stone Country. Without their confidence and friendship over the years neither of these books would have been possible. I owe a particular debt to my dear friend Dr Anita Heiss, one of Australia’s foremost Indigenous scholars and writers. I take this opportunity to record my gratitude also to Professor Gerd Dose, of Hamburg University, who generously read the manuscript and offered me invaluable advice and encouragement.
Lastly, I wish to thank my wonderful editor, Ali Lavau, and publisher, Annette Barlow, and her splendid team at Allen & Unwin.
The chapter titled ‘Massacre’ is my own fiction. It is, however, a story that I have based on a real event in Australian history known as the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre. Cullin-la-Ringo is said to have been the largest-ever massacre of white settlers by Indigenous Australians in our history. I first heard the story when I was sixteen and was newly arrived from London in the Central Highlands of Queensland—embarked, so I understood, on the most astonishing adventure of my life. I was working as a stockman on a cattle station near Springsure, not far from Cullin-la-Ringo, the station on which the massacre took place on 17 October 1861. The massacre was an event that owned then, and to this day I believe still owns, a sacred place in the collective memory of the local station people and their families.
On that fine October day in 1861, every member of the strongest and most well-armed party of white settlers ever to enter the Central Highlands up to that time was killed by the local Aborigines in whose country they had thought to settle. There were nineteen deaths in all. The accounts tell us there were no Aboriginal casualties that day. When I first heard this story as a youth, it seemed to me that the attack on this large party of armed white settlers must have been extraordinarily well planned, and that there must have been an Aboriginal leader of great character and ruthless strategic intelligence behind the planning of it. No mention of such an Aboriginal leader was ever made, however, in the accounts that were told to me, and my earnest inquiries about the existence of such a person at the time were met with a response which implied that, as a newcomer to Australia and in particular to the Central Highlands of Queensland, my question was naive. My private belief, that there must have been such a leader among the Aborigines of those days persisted. In writing this fiction I have not relied solely on my own memory of the stories I was told in my youth, nor on the results of my contemporary discussions with Aboriginal friends, but have consulted a number of books and articles, some of which have been of great use to me in recovering a sense of the European historical context of the massacre. The most thorough and detailed account is to be found in Les Perrin’s assiduously researched Cullin-la-Ringo: The Triumph and Tragedy of Tommy Wills, Les Perrin, 1998. Gordon Reid’s essay ‘From Hornet Bank to Cullin-la-Ringo’, in the Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. X1, No. 2, 1980–81, was of great use to me, as was, Henry Reynolds’ ‘Settlers and Aborigines on the Pastoral Frontier’, in Lectures on North Queensland History, James Cook University, Townsville 1974, and, lastly, David Carment’s, ‘The Wills Massacre of 1861: Aboriginal–European Conflict on the Colonial Australian Frontier’, in the Journal of Australian Studies, 6 June 1980.