Desert Tracks

 

(c) 2025 by Marly Wells and Linda Wells

It was not too long ago that I wrote a blog which posed the question, can we ever read too much about the holocaust? (Of course not.) This post is posing the same question regarding First Australians, but the confronting truth is, there aint so much out there truth-telling for YAs. 

I applaud the courage of the authors of 'Desert Tracks' for unapologetically naming the beast and addressing the fallout from (and since) colonisation. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... to my mind, there is no stone left unturned (gulp) but the reader is surprisingly left with hope for the future. Education is the key. Guess that's why I still love my job.

The Wells' write with grace. The narrative is not bitter in spite of its clarity in outlining historical atrocities eked upon Aboriginal Australians. In a fantasy style, using time travel, the reader is given a firsthand glimpse of what life may have been like for Aboriginal Australians living in Central Australia during colonisation. There are also many reality checks for what life is like around Alice Springs today. The story has a sense of balance and fairness in the researched findings - anyone who is behaving in an inhumane or corrupt manner is called out. The language of the text is simple. An easy read of only 240 pp, it would speak to students from10 years old up.

Aunt Gem laughed. 'I don't know bout comin into schools. We didn't have such a good time at school Millie. It's hard for people of my generation to go into schools, even now. But it is getting better. They startin to tell the whole story, not just from the white man's point of view... What appened before, it's not over. Colonisation aint something the white fellas brought in a while ago, like one big, brutal party, and it's all over now. Where's it gone? Nah, it's right ere, every day. Every day our mob feel the consequences of that colonisation that just keeps on goin. Why are the jails full of our mob? The hospitals? Why our mob the poorest, most unemployed people? Why we die young, especially our blokes. We not useless, Mill. We good people. But when the white man came, e set up systems to support is way. We live ere for thousands of years my niece, lookin after this country, passin on our ways. Ow long them mob been here? Coupla minutes. An they already done so much damage, to us, to the land, to the other species. It's not over, Mill. Past isn't past. Past is ere, right now.' (pp.60-1)