While this book is an up-to-date account of the situation in Australia generally and particularly in Yarrabah, an Aboriginal community near Cairns, Queensland, most of the research was done in 1984.

This was an incredibly significant time when nearly 100 years of legal oppression and segregation of Indigenous people in Queensland came to an end. What began in 1897 as legislation to ostensibly protect Indigenous people from white society, including outright slaughter, ended up as the Queensland Aborigines Act which put them on reserves with a permit system like apartheid South Africa? Read real life stories about segregation, self-management, land rights and human rights.