This documentary novel gives and inspiring answer to the question “Can the aborigines earn the status of full citizenship in White Australia?”
Here is the story of a group of Australian aborigines who have succeeded in standing on their own feet. We see aborigines waken from primitive childhood to the realisation as young men and women that they must adjust themselves to the way of life of the white community which controls their destiny.
The yandy – the shallow dish used in their mining operations – becomes their means of escape from the virtual slavery of life as an inferior race of station hands with no stake in the future of the country over which their tribes have hunted for thousands of years. The tribal customs and aboriginal lore which have developed over these thousands of years are most movingly described, and hope is held out that the best features of tribal life can be retained to give the aborigine a pattern for living in the modern world.
A feeling of hope for the future of a primitive people permeates the whole novel as Stuart tells the story of a strike of aboriginal station hands in the North-west of Western Australia in 1946. At first opposed by police and squatters “the mob” ultimately won their rights to independence, and after many trials and tribulations established their mining cooperative in the vicinity of Marble Bar and Port Hedland.”