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Title: Regrettably Prescient
Review: Here's an excellent introducion to the Ernabella Mission and the perspicacious author, Winifred, whose observations were earned from a decade of working with the Pitjantjatjara people of the North east of South Australia. It's not a specialist's book, and is mostly free of evengalical cant. For better or worse, I wonder how much updating the good Winifred would need to reprise her text with were that a possibility. The commentary, from my experiences, might well have been penned during the recent decade, not the mid 1960s. Ted Strehlow provides the foreword commendation and he would have been among the very few, of that era, with the requisite articulation and insight to do Hilliard justice. He notes her well-chosen selections from the diaries of the early Auistralian explorers, and if, for no other reason, this book is a valuable read, as it sets the enduring context with rebounding, enduring resonance, for any text on indigenous Australians.
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