Outback

Outback is of course an Australian word meaning back country. There is an implication of remoteness and sparse population, and remoteness and scarcity of people are at least an element in this book. There is also, behind the word, an implication that very little in the human sense happens there, and that what does happen can be slow and undramatic. This book sets itself to show that nothing could be less true. It is as if in the immeiisity of outback Australia people's temperaments expand like yeast to occupy and give point to the immensities of space. It is hoped therefore that in these pages you will visit an enchanting and unknown country whose customs, secrets, ironies and landscapes you could riot previously have guessed at. To return to the term outback: it can be applied to many regions of Australia, but the region which in the imaginations of most Australians is outback par excellence is the Northern Territory, and this book deals mainly with the Territory and its neighbouring areas. Among other objectives, it attempts to link the history of that astounding country to the people who live there now. It does not try to give an exhaustive chronology either of the European occupation of the Territory or of the venerable millennia of the Aboriginal Dreaming, but it looks at the frontier which still exists in the Northern Territory, at the men and women - often of a nineteenth-century-style character, certainty and toughness - who live their extraordinary lives there. This account also attempts to enter that tribal cosmos of the Aboriginals, that other Australia of the Aboriginal mind, so different from the Australia of the European as to be another continent, another planet. It tries to examine in graphic terms the points at which the two world-views - white and black - depart from each other or collide.