WEST AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL

Award-winning study of life within the Moore River Native Settlement. Part of the bold social experiment by the ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’ A O Neville, the Western Australian settlement was for thirty years ‘sort of a place like home’ for thousands of indigenous people. Making extensive and imaginative use of oral sources and official documents, Sort of a Place Like Home creates a vivid and intimate picture of the life experience of Moore River inmates, while documenting the appalling bureaucratic incompetence, official indifference and occasional brutality that made Moore River notorious. Surprisingly, not all the memories are bad. In the midst of the institutional gloom, determination and optimism united inmates – a testament to the human durability that Neville’s experiment sought to destroy. 141214/0118/1219/211223 pp. 368 illusts

(ex-college library marking, only on fpd – otherwise fine)