Dingo makes us human

The Aboriginal people are essential figures in White Australia's mythology, and as such are often represented as being intrinsic to the past. Nevertheless their role in the future is widely perceived as being irrelevant and the much publicised images of the squalor and misery of contemporary Aboriginal communities often serve to further alienate European Australia from Aboriginal Australia. Debbie Bird Rose's highly original ethnography of the people of the Victoria River Valley in the Northern Territory fulfils what she sees as anthropology's basic purpose: to emphasise our shared humanity. In Dingo Makes Us Human, members of several Aboriginal communities recount their stories, stories which bring the past and present, the specific and general and the individual and collective into a shared matrix. The study has a firm historical grounding, describing the decimation and subjugation of the Aboriginal people in the region following white colonisation.^ In 1883, Victoria River Downs was the largest cattle station in the world and 4-5,000 Aboriginal people lived in its surrounding area; by 1939, 187 people remained, complete tribes and languages having been destroyed. This nightmaris