These four little known but interwoven histories, like most genuine Australian histories, need to be retold often. Each contains glimpses of other stories that could be fleshed out to become significant components of Australia's disturbing cultural memory. In several ways the title, From the Edge is not quite right. Yes, they are far-flung, mainly coastal stories, but their unifying subject is less that they are geographically peripheral and more that they are about how a highly evolved Aboriginal civilization (continues today) was misunderstood, ignored and largely wiped-out by insensible, duplicitous and barbaric invaders (disease is another story). The dismissive rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and UK mining company, Rio Tinto's willful destruction of the 46,000 year-old Aboriginal cultural occupation of Juukan Gorge in May 2020 provide recent evidence that little or nothing has changed. The title of the book could have just as easily been Nation Building Failures or British Blood Lust.

No matter how much our present-day sensibilities might wish to 'move on' from histories of violence and oppression, it remains a perpetual obligation to remember the way in which the land was conquered.

While I was engrossed (and sometime distressed) by these stories, I found that McKenna's commentary was occasionally and unexpectedly less insightful and more platitudinous; closer to pandering to some form of self-flagellating national disgrace that needs to be examined more carefully if anything is to change. That nothing much has changed when it comes to the devastatingly destructive power of successively incompetent Government attempts to make amends has been clearly articulated by Noel Pearson (mentioned in the last story). For anyone interested in why the settlers behaved so badly, I would point you to Wiley's When the Sky Fell Down. Wiley examines contemporary reports of Aboriginal contact in early Sydney that resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Aboriginal groups and culture. He traces the idea that what you believe influences what you see. At the time, many believed that the Aborigines were not human and were some lower form of barbarous savage. The Aborigines, in turn, saw how the invaders engaged in flogging and hanging and saw these new arrivals as cruel savages.

These ideas, though not mentioned, are exemplified in the contacts described by McKenna.

A few years ago I walked in bare feet about 200 km (six days) along the south western coast of Victoria. I camped in the dunes and carried little. So I had some small insight into the 700 km walk to Sydney up the east coast. Fascinating as this walk was, there was very little detail perhaps due to Clarke's lost journal. But McKenna does raise some intriguing questions. Whatever happened to the Bengalis? Whatever happened to the escaped convicts who set off on foot back to Sydney from Wilson's Promontory? The great unwritten history of white settlement in Australia revolves around the escapees and the forgotten people who inhabited the inland of Australia long before the 'explorers' opened it up.

Speaking of explorers, the arrival of failed explorer Ludwig Leichardt in the failed Singapore aka Port Essington would almost be funny were it not such a sad place. The Captain John McArthur who dutifully saw though the attempted establishment of Port Essington was not the same John Macarthur whose wife established the wool industry in his absence.

I travelled through the Pilbara in the 1970s a little before the industrialisation of the Burrup Peninsular. What is it about Australian Governments that they venerate 3,000 year old Egyptian pyramids and Greek ruins but can't grasp the value of 40,000-60,000 year old artworks and so allow them to be bulldozed with impunity and sanction the treatment of its living custodians with derision and contempt? ( )