THE remote Kimberley community of Oombulgurri is a ghost town today: its roads are empty, its schoolrooms silent, its battered houses still. Yet for almost a century this far-flung Aboriginal settlement was the home of grand hopes and elaborate, constantly receding dreams.

In its first incarnation, as the Forrest River Anglican mission, it played a key role in the taming of the Kimberley and the transformation of the north. That story is recounted in punctilious detail in this book by Neville Green, one of the unsung masters of West Australian regional history.

Triumphs and Tragedies may seem a comprehensive title. In fact, it gives little impression of the wild ventures and strange schemes related in these pages: their sweep, their scope, their gradual unfoldings and unravellings. Green saw some of the recent history of Forrest River in person during the late 1960s as headmaster at the little mission school in its final days. He has kept in touch with the local people ever since, and this contact lends his account a shimmer of intimacy and empathy often lacking in synoptic accounts of broad scale social change in the Australian north.

B&W photo illustrations

australia australian aborigines aboriginal indigenous history western Oombulgurri #0517R