Winner of the 2009 Manning Clarke House Cultural Award.

Have Australian Aboriginal communities become places of increased suffering because of the progressive policies of the 1970s–2000s? In this provocative book, Australia's leading anthropologist, Peter Sutton, looks at these decades of optimism and grief and argues that there has not been a better quality of life for Indigenous Australians. For a significant number, the last thirty years has been a period of decline in safety, in health, in literacy and numeracy, in employment, and in hope. How can this be so? Peter Sutton points to the failures of the past and looks forward to the hopeful rise of a new era.

Peter Sutton is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Adelaide. A world-renowned anthropologist and field linguist, he has worked on land claims across Australia since 1969. His books include Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia and Native Title in Australia: an Ethnographic Perspective.