Mark Kolbe/Getty Images, Blank Inc., Angus & Robertson, W.R. Smith & Paterson, The ConversationAlice’s dreaming is centrally about the childhood, memories and writings of Alice Duncan-Kemp (1901-1988), who grew up on a pastoral property named Mooraberrie in the first decades of the 20th century. Mooraberrie was a vast sheep and cattle station located in the Channel Country between Birdsville and Windorah in inland south-western Queensland. A 2015 native title determination recognised Mithaka people as the traditional owners of the region.Duncan-Kemp published four books in her lifetime and another was published posthumously. All of these works drew on a childhood spent in intimate contact with Mithaka people. Her extraordinarily detailed and empathetic observations formed part of the documentary basis for the 2015 native title determination. Review: Alice’s dreaming – Tom Griffiths (Black Inc.)What then of the word “dreaming” in Tom Griffiths’ title? According to the historian Patrick Wolfe, the word “dreamtime” entered the Australian lexicon via the early anthropological research collaboration between Frank Gillen, the postmaster at Mparntwe (Alice Springs), and Baldwin Spencer, a professor of biology at the University of Melbourne. Their famed partnership resulted in a huge collection of objects, images and films, which has been digitised. Channel Country, Cooper Creek, Windorah, Queensland. Stuart Watt, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY The Arrernte term “alcheringa” was translated by Gillen as the “dream-times”: a long-distant epoch in which the world was created and rules of conduct were laid down. Wolfe was critical of the generalisation of Spencer and Gillen’s notion of the “dream-times”. He showed that dreams were a counterpoint to European scientific rationalism; the connection between “dreaminess” and Aboriginal people reinforced some of the racist presumptions of both 19th-century anthropology and the popular imagination.The mid-20th century anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner preferred the term “Dreaming”, which better captured the complexity of an “impalpable and subtle” concept that refers to cosmogony as well as institutions, totemic affiliations and ever-present responsibilities to Country. Specific, local terms are more preferable still. Arrernte people today conceive of the “Altyerra” or “Altyerre” , rather than “alcheringa”, and Yawuru people in and around Broome conceive of the “Bugarrigarra”, to mention just two examples. Griffiths, an emeritus professor of history at Australian National University, insists his book is about “Alice’s dreaming”: a different concept again when it is attached to a white child. He certainly leans on the general idea of dreaminess, but then Alice’s perspective was that of an enchanted and imaginative child. Her writings seem to indicate and induce a state of reverie. But Griffiths also means to suggest Duncan-Kemp’s incorporation into Mithaka understandings of their Country and the ancestral beings, stories and songs that animate it. When Alice was two years old, she survived an accident as she was travelling in a buggy crossing the flooded Bullo River. She might have been killed by a flowering branch of a bauhinia tree, but was unscathed. This event confirmed a connection between little Alice and Yammacoona, a powerful Dreaming mother-figure associated with the bauhinia. This story is told in the first section the book, the most absorbing of its four parts. Here, Griffiths makes use of Alice’s extensive writings, beautifully enhancing her insights. Country pulses; it is intimately known and crammed with people, meanings and resources. Mithaka people are constantly hunting and harvesting. Alongside this powerful evocation of the vitality of Country, Griffiths provides an account of Aboriginal labour in the pastoral economy. Mithaka people were skilled at working with horses and stock. Women performed domestic labour. All of this was unwaged. It seems to me, however, that these exploited Mithaka workers did not suffer a “social death”, to use slavery scholar Orlando Patterson’s influential term. Mithaka people also attended to intensive ceremonial activities, such as the “goose corroboree”, which entreated magpie geese and other wildfowl to come to the lagoons and waterholes, ensuring a bounty. These ceremonial efforts and the everyday activities more usually classified as “work” provided for the necessities of life. Duncan-Kemp, too, is often hard at work throughout this section of the book. She recalled that some children learned to muster from horseback as young as six or eight. Griffiths usefully clarifies how commonplace this was: children on the pastoral frontier in the early 20th century were granted adult responsibilities. Less convincing is Griffiths’ sweeping statement in the prologue: “Aboriginal people were the respected ‘landlords’ of the pastoralists.” By this, he means Duncan-Kemp’s father referred to the Mithaka people who lived, worked on and had input into the running of Mooraberrie as “landlords”. The designation tells us something about William Duncan. But it did not make Mithaka people landlords. Patently, they did not enjoy legal title to property and did not extract rent from tenants. Tom Griffiths. Black Inc. A portrait of cultural dynamismSequencing is important, as Griffith acknowledges. In the second part of the book, he backtracks from the early years of the 20th century to the violent period preceding Alice’s birth. “More than a dozen major massacres are known and remembered in the Channel Country,” he records, “most of them well organised and intended to kill the maximum amount of people.” The massacres often took place at waterholes, “precious jewels” in a region prone to droughts and floods, and generally involved the Native Mounted Police. The seemingly large populations that feature in Duncan-Kemp’s childhood reminiscences in fact represent a “greatly reduced community”. One of her key teachers is Bogie, whose mother and sister were killed in a massacre when he was a teenager.The sequencing is effective. Griffiths explains that after the passage of a repressive 1897 Act, which provided for the mass institutionalisation of Aboriginal people on reserves across Queensland, being “attached to a station and valued by a white leaseholder became a crucial passport to survival and to continuing tenure of one’s Country”. All of this is crucial to understanding the roles of Alice’s carers and teachers, and their attachment to Mooraberrie. Griffiths’ considered organisation of the material allows the reader first to appreciate the thriving cultural world that Duncan-Kemp encountered, as she perceived it, before grasping that this is a portrait of Aboriginal cultural dynamism in the wake of immense disruption. The book is describing efforts at revitalisation, rather than simply giving an account of local “traditions”. But the long-windedness that Griffiths acknowledges as a feature of Duncan-Kemp’s accounts of her childhood begins to emerge as a problem in his own book. Griffiths writes of the “intricate web of capillaries” that sustain the alluvial floodplains of Mithaka Country, and his book, too, has a branching structure. In the last two sections, I frequently lost track of his inquiry into the meaning and contemporary significance of Duncan-Kemp’s words.Griffiths explores Duncan-Kemp’s compulsion to write, some biographical details of her adulthood, and the very serious problems with plagiarism in her books. He also muses about the importance of reading, sets out the environmental history of the region, and talks of its truffles and birds. He explains the importance of Aboriginal grindstones, which were used to process endemic grain species. I became disoriented reading a book that is about so many things and began to wonder what, exactly, it is about.Contemporary collaborationsThe book’s fourth and final section is more focused than the third. In this section, Griffiths turns to a life lived in parallel to Duncan-Kemp’s: that of Bill Gorringe, who was born to Mithaka woman Nuncaleer and an older stockman, George Gorringe, around the same year as Alice. Nuncaleer and George’s descendants have been involved in recent alliances between graziers and Aboriginal people to protect Country from large-scale irrigation and mining proposals. Bill’s daughter, Rainy McKellar, now collaborates with Alice’s grandson Will Kemp, pouring over Duncan-Kemp’s archive as part of contemporary efforts to reinvigorate cultural knowledge of Mithaka Country. Perhaps perversely, what this book isn’t about also becomes a problem towards its end. As I have noted, Griffiths makes clear that Mithaka people worked for no wages on Mooraberrie. He is one of Australia’s most eminent historians, yet he does not mention the important scholarship on slavery, stolen wages and pastoralism. Also, Griffiths opens the chapter titled “Treaty” with an anecdote about the Queensland government’s Path to Treaty initiative. This is a literary framing device for a chapter dealing with an 1889 negotiated settlement that brought to a close decades of violence in the Channel Country. But there is no discussion of the fact that the Crisafulli government repealed the Path to Treaty Act in 2024. It’s not that I object to hopeful and revelatory stories: I’m desperate for them. But redemptive narratives surely must, somewhere and in some way, engage with the intensifying racism of the present.Eve Vincent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.