"The story you will write is obliterative. You think my story cannot coexist harmoniously with yours; because it precedes yours, and in the upward trajectory, everything that existed before must be silenced, disavowed, or be broken on the torture wheel. In your reckoning, I can possess no martyrdom, I am only an object of derision or pity. I am a long shadow in the early afternoon, soon to disappear as the fleeting sun tracks west, like the flocking black cockatoos, as if to roost. Your gift is persuasion. And your stories will overwhelm mine. [Wistfully] But not forever."

Browning wields words with the precision of a scalpel in this collection. The knife less dissects than reveals, with Browning's critical eye on Blak art as the highlight. These essays are magnificent, and their evolution traces Browning's engagement with artists such as Richard Bell and Daniel Boyd, and the ways in which that engagement has impacted both.  
Also worth of note are Browning's profiles, based on interviews with people including Doris Pilkington, Archie Roach and survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home. Here, Browning's words are wielded gently, telling stories of pain and resilience. I was less enamoured with Browning's poetry than his prose. The play, like the essays, is worthy of savouring and lingering to think about what is said so precisely.
In all this volume, as in his career, Browning tells stories that create spaces for Indigeneity and especially queer Indigeneity. There is a joyful sense of community that comes through these pages, admixed with justified anger. "The hereditary original sin – dispossession and the theft of the Australian land mass – is rarely if ever confronted and the barely suppressed rage of Aboriginal people is pathologised as a form of sociopathy. Let’s make this clear: Aboriginal people are entitled to feel deprived. Only the utterly delusional could suggest otherwise. But instead the popular, media and political discourse that constellates around the term ‘Aboriginal’ inheres a radical amnesia or collective delusion, if you like. In fact, if you don’t believe in it, the discourse doesn’t make sense." In this volume at least, the discourse makes all too much sense.