Nine hours' drive east of Darwin, where the Northern Territory of Australia and Queensland meet, you will find the Gulf of Carpentaria, the sea that separates the top lip of the continent from New Guinea. The surrounding area features in tourist brochures as part of a rugged 'real Australia', home to cattle farming, barramundi fishing, a thriving mining industry, a national park and a nature reserve. It is an orthodox, homogeneous picture of bucolic peace and productivity in which you would be hard-pressed to discover any references to the Aboriginal land wars that have been part of life in the area for the last four hundred years, or, indeed, to the tensions between the indigenous population and the Queensland government over Aboriginal land rights that are the stuff of day-to-day contemporary politics.

LRB 24 April 2008 | PDF Download