This is a collection of work by W.E.H. Stanner, one of Australia's finest essayists. A superb anthropologist, he was both perceptive and prophetic about the Aboriginal people he knew; yet his work has been out of print and astonishingly hard to find for many years. The revival of these essays, selected and introduced by Robert Manne, is a significant event.

'Bill Stanner was a superb essayist with a wonderful turn of phrase and ever fresh prose. He always had important things to say, which have not lost their relevance. It is wonderful that they will now be available to a new and larger audience.' -Henry Reynolds