Set with the backdrop of Papunya, a Northern Territory Aboriginal community whose history showed so much promise but whose dysfunction is now more prominent that its famous artwork, King Brown Country is a book that has to be published. It goes to the core of Indigenous issues today to expose unmitigated misery, shocking levels of domestic violence and sex abuse and extreme alcohol and substance dependency. But above all, it reveals how a powerful fiefdom was allowed to rule unchallenged and unchecked to the great detriment of a once secure community and explains why the intervention was necessary, and why it may not work.
King Brown Country is a powerful and shaming portrait of a community in crisis. Papunya remains an emblem for the failure of all Australians to come to terms with the continent's oldest inhabitants.
