These books are put together from raw material collected from an old man or woman, or a person of note. The collection usually involves sitting down with a person and telling him talk into some sort of recording device or, in the past, taking notes of the conversation. After many hours enough material has been collected and it is transcribed, then re-written, edited and finally shaped into a suitable form for publication. Most of these books are interesting because of the person and his situation, though whether they have any lasting merit as literary works is another matter. Lamilami Speaks is the only one approaching in literary merit the classic study The Children of Sanchez, put together by Oscar Lewis. The Children of Sanchez is much more than a life story of a single person. It is a family story packed with incident. Such a book approaches the universality of the novel and can be judged on that level rather than as field notes done up for publication by an anthropologist.

Even with the limitations of the ‘one-shot case study’ the reader can still enter into the life of a human being. The books are about persons living in different regions in Australia and one can compare and contrast the lot of the Aborigine in areas such as the Northern Territory, North Queensland, Western Australia and even urban environments. Somewhere Between Black and White is valuable because it gives us the story of a man of Aboriginal descent living in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

The collector, Kingsley Palmer, an Englishman, was educated at Sheffield and Leeds Universities and has studied Aborigines since coming to Australia in the course of researching for his Ph.D. He contributes a brilliant introduction to the book which outlines the dilemma facing people of both Aboriginal and European descent and their place or lack of a place in contemporary Australian society.

The dominant white man denied the part­Aboriginal access to European society, relegating him to the inferior status afforded to the other blacks. (p. ix). There are, however few signs of overt prejudice amongst the Aborigines themselves. (p. x.)

In fact, Clancy was accepted by his mother’s people to the extent that he was acknowledged as a leader.

What comes out in the story is that the Aboriginal people were not part of the cause of Clancy’s unrest at being half and half. Rejection is on the side of the whites and does not come from the Aborigines who accept him as an equal. Just such an impasse caused the American people of African descent to label themselves blacks rather than Negro. That is, they choose to define themselves by their colour (to all white people, coloured people are black) and not by race. People of Aboriginal descent in Australia are faced with the same problem. They are neither Aboriginal or European, but mudamuda, in between, and discriminated against more often for their skin colour than for their race.

Unfortunately, unlike Clancy, most of them have little Aboriginal culture to fall back on if they try to separate themselves from the majority culture. The products of a long process of being educated into the white system which they now reject, and of having their Aboriginality systematically destroyed by unfeeling teachers, they must try to come to grips with themselves as black people in a white society. If they identify with traditional Aboriginal ways, they are faced with the prospect of painfully re-learning a culture which, owing to their conditioning, they often find more alien than the surrounding Anglo-Saxon one. Clancy states this problem of being black and poor (half-caste) and of being half a white man (mudamuda) which to him seems without solution:

‘There were plenty of bad times all right. See, I got two names mudamunda and half-caste. See I wanted nowhere. See whitefella call me half-caste, well I don’t want it there, Aborigine he call me mudamuda, I’m not there. I’m in the middle, and I’m strong on the both sides, I’m half way in between. I tell the other blokes that I’m half a white bloke and half an Aborigine. But I reckon I’d have been better off an Aborigine, ‘cause I was more with them and got the feeling for them here.’ He pointed at his stomach (p. 124)

See quite a lot of people ask me, you blackfella? You half-caste? Well, they call me black. Anyone come along and say, ‘Hi there black man’. Well, it wasn’t my fault being black. (p. 125).

Clancy is an old man, and still has not come to grips with or solved the problem of being black in Australia. As in the introduction Palmer states: Clancy started not only disadvantaged, but positively a loser. Apart from the English, whether it is possible to be a positive loser, Clancy’s life has been the lifestyle of thousands like him. Up to recently (and even now) to be born black is to be born deformed, is to be born right at the bottom of the heap without a chance of ever getting even part way to the top.

Somewhere Between Black and White shows us what it was like to be born Black in Australia, to be born with a white father and an Aboriginal mother. A situation into which many black people are born. And from this Clancy’s life unfolds. Briefly, it enters history when Clancy finds himself mixed up in the events in the Pilbara region when the Aborigines under Don McLeod strove for self-determination and self­management by forming their own company and refusing to work on the cattle stations for a mere pittance. This story has been told by Donald Stuart in his book Yandy and his account and Clancy’s can now be compared. From this short period of militancy, Clancy’s life flows on until when, in his seventies, he comes to rest at Wadangine where a whitefella comes and wants to construct his story. The result of that collaboration is this book about black people living in their world and the social customs that govern their lives and their relationships with the white boss.

It is well worth reading.