In the 1880s, these feuding speakers of Ngarinman, Mudbura, Bilinara, Ngaliwurru, Kangpurri, Wardaman, Gurindji, and Malngin found themselves confronted by a scourge of a different kind: Europeans with cattle, some en route from Queensland to the Kimberleys, others taking up ‘pasture’ in the Victoria River region itself.

Over the next forty or so years, these strangers showed a determination to subdue with guns Aboriginal people who speared their cattle or who objected to white men’s assumption of control over country, women, and labour time. Aboriginal people faced two options in this period of what Rose calls ‘total power’ and ‘terror’: work for the white man’s rations (as labourer, informant, killer, or concubine); or to take to the sandstone country, continuing to hunt and gather food but risking being ‘hunted’ and ‘gathered’ themselves, as outlaws, by police, settlers, and black accomplices.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, a ‘new deal’ began to emerge for Aboriginal people by then living entirely within the ‘pastoralists’ domain. Warfare among Aboriginal peoples had ceased, and police and pastoralists had less often to beat and even less to kill their black servants, as Aboriginal parents had now instilled compliance and pride of workmanship into those of their children who survived the cattle industry’s austerities and dangers.

Survival rates seem to have improved from the 1940s. In this period, a welfare bureaucracy backed by the distant compassion of humanitarians of various kinds slowly opened up a space of reform, partly underwritten, in the 1960s, by cash payments from the government.

The possibilities of reform were finally put to the test in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, when Aboriginal people in this region were emboldened to strike for better work conditions and to demand the return of some of their stolen land.

In the last fifteen years, some, but not all of those demands have been met by governments and pastoralists. In the same period, buoyed by such political successes, the region’s Aboriginal historians have begun to produce, for non-Aboriginal’s, tape recorded narratives of the past one hundred years, narratives presented, here, in generous slabs and often corroborated from other sources by Deborah Bird Rose. Since 1980, she and Darrell Lewis have been visiting Yarralin, a 149-square-kilometre block excised in 1984 from Victoria River Downs. There she has recorded stories from the late Hobbles Danayarri, Anzac Munnganyi, Jimmy Manngayarri, Ivy Kulngarri, and many others. Lewis’s photos of these men and women illustrate the book.

The matters that preoccupy these historians and those that preoccupy Rose can be made sense of in terms of the above chronology, but they are not identical to it or reducible to it.

The black historians have elected to tell stories of violence and cruelty (by both white and black figures), and they recall in vivid detail the routines of work and its stinting remunerations.

‘I have searched my tapes, notebooks and memories for an unambivilently [sic] happy story,’ Rose explains, ‘and I have found none.’ These are stories of personalities, not only of conditions of life. Alligator Tommy, Luwutmarwu, Old Groden – the figures who feature in these stories (Rose’s selection from what her informants have selected from their memories are adventurers as much as they are sufferers). Like the protagonists of Aboriginal mythology, their deeds exemplify a range of human qualities. Mordant, certainly not ‘unambivilently happy’, these tales illustrate what Rose terms the regions ‘deathscape’, but they also convey the teller’s moral distance from the violence of the past and their assumption that, now, the time of the tales’ telling, is a period of reconciliation. Rose suggests that by deciding to talk this history the black historians are now enacting their long held faith that Australians are not morally bankrupt.

Rose fully accepts that to tell history and to receive it are moral enterprises. Her reception of what the black historians chose to give her consists of two kinds of work: reproducing the historians words and, where possible, buttressing their facticity with quotes from written sources rendering their stories intelligible and plausible as ‘history’; and meditating on the issue of Aborigines’ agency, making sense of actions both collaborative and resistant, and trying to reconcile them with the moral premise which governs her entire enterprise. It is in this latter work that Rose exhibits a brave intelligence – ‘brave’ because she is forced to concede the inconclusive character of any meditation on the morally imponderable and the empirically inaccessible. I do not remember any reference to Primo Levi, but some literature of the Holocaust is echoed in this book.

In particular, Rose is fascinated by that pattern of human behaviour in which terror inspires collaboration. Time and again she returns the puzzle of those Aboriginal people who helped the invaders, in various ways, to hunt down and kill the blacks judged to be a risk to the pastoralists’ viability. Her valuable chapter on the region’s endemic warfare suggests one explanation (and further undermines a view that Aboriginal people lived in harmony until the White serpent stole into the Garden of Eden). Another factor would seem to have been that European patronage offered some relief from Aborigines’ onerous politics of wife bestowal. But the ‘heart of the matter’, she argues, is that people were too terrified to do anything but obey Whites’ commands: you collaborated or you died. Riley Young Winpilin’s words, conveying the starkness of that choice, appear in her opening and closing chapters:

Don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about him. If [he wants to] fight, give it away. Because olden times, you know, you can get shot like a dog. They shoot you like a dog and just let it, let you, burn on the fire.

The apparent collaboration of women, which can be viewed as treacherous in its intimacy when it is not explained simply as rape, gives rise to Rose’s most sensitive passage – sensitive not only to the contingencies of what happened then, but also to the contingencies of remembering since then and of talking about it now. She finds it impossible to generalise about the politics of frontier sexual relations, and not the least of her reasons is women’s silence. Some histories remain hidden. Why this silence?

In earlier decades, there may have been little that women could do that would not target them for someone’s anger. The only safe representation of self would be that of the complete passive victim. Such a representation, in addition to being highly contestable, does not match women’s sense of themselves as responsible moral agents. Silence, in this instance, seems to speak directly to the problematics of speech.

One thing that makes this comment so illuminating also makes it rather exceptional. It may be the only moment in her book in which Rose acknowledges that the audience of those previously ‘hidden histories’ consists not only of non-Aboriginals wishing to substantiate their own critique of Australian history; but also of other Aboriginal people – friends and relatives – for whom these stories may have much more personal resonances.

Therefore, my only complaint about this historiographically sensitive and morally momentous book is that it is ethnographically too circumspect. Rose does not place her historians or their stories in the contemporary culture at Yarralin. Who hears these stories? On what occasions? Who may repeat them? Who, if anyone is empowered by their telling? Young people at Yarralin presumably watch videos, but do they study history? Perhaps we will get some answers to these questions in Debbie Rose’s forthcoming Dingo Makes Us Human.