Not Dark Yet: A personal history is a 2011 book by Australian cultural historian David Walker, who suffered a sudden and severe loss of sight due to macular degeneration which limited his ability to continue archival research and forced him to "find another, more personal voice and another way of writing". The book documents his own and his family's relationship to the past. This was a significant departure from Walker's academic work in which he is a pre-eminent authority on Australia's engagement with Asia. However, through this book, Walker found that the personal has a role in the writing of history; "small events also have their place in determining who we are and what we value as individuals and as a community". Summary Not Dark Yet traces the story of Walker's family over five generations; from the settlement of his great-great grandparents in South Australia in the 1850s until the death of his mother in the 1990s. Many of the early chapters are set in Burra, a copper mining town 156 km (97 miles) north of Adelaide, where his family were well-known shopkeepers. Of particular significance is the story of Luke Day, a relative through marriage and a Chinese merchant in Burra. Here the personal narrative intersects with the author's academic interests and Walker uses Day's life to re-examine the position held by the Chinese in Australian society during a period when Australian racial nationalism and the resultant White Australia Policy were strident. Walker captures the essence of life in a small Australian town at the beginning of the twentieth century with all its strengths, limitations and petty jealousies. In later sections of the book Walker intimately describes the lives of his parents and his own journey into academia. Australia's engagement with Asia is again given prominence through the description of the devastating effects that the Second World War had on the author's family. When he was a child, Walker was unaware of the fate of uncle Laurie and mention of his name lead to uncomfortable silences. This led Walker to use his historian's skills to investigate Laurie's life. He discovered that his uncle had volunteered for service with the 13th squadron of the RAAF and had been posted to Ambon. He had attempted to escape from the island when it was overrun by the advancing Japanese but through a series of fateful mishaps was captured and executed in the