'In 2015, Richie Benaud hosted an ‘Australia Day’ barbeque, a pantheon of colonial historical figures on his invite list. Benaud gathered the English navigator, Captain James Cook, who remapped and renamed the east coast of this continent in 1770, and Burke and Wills, whose agonising deaths at Coopers Creek in 1861 were possibly in part the result of them coming to rely on the seeds of an aquatic fern, nardoo (Marsilea drummondii), for nutrition.' (Introduction)

'This book is an excellent and accessibly written local history of the 20 years following the celebrated 1960s Wave Hill Walk-off. Perhaps surfing – as much as creating – an attitudinal shift in the mainstream Australian community, the Gurindji Walk- off came to symbolise Aboriginal resistance to oppressions as well as persistence in the face of hostility from powerful establishment interests. Elements of the non- Aboriginal Australian community (some unions, some activists and eventually the Labor Party) accepted this Indigenous aspiration and allied with the Gurindji. A wave of support promised to realise the Gurindji’s dreams. Aspirational purity was then overgrown and stunted by some political hostility allied with much more bureaucratic incapacity and incoherence. Ward is a historian who was peripherally involved in the events he describes, although he is generally even-handed in his assessments. He introduces the usual characters of settlement politics, bickering activists, robber opportunists and passing bureaucrats that still interpose between the Aboriginal people of northern Australia and the state. After the post–walk off struggle, the Gurindji themselves started to divide, so that the dreams of the old heroes of the 1960s began to be less important as social change hit their community, as it did similar communities across remote Australia.'

'These two excellent volumes fortuitously have appeared together, and can be read consecutively. Yikarni is a collection of historical narratives, mainly told in Gurindji, with an English translation on the opposite page. Charlie Ward, in A Handful of Sand, after a prolegomena that effectively takes up half the book, covers the declining fortunes of the Gurindji since Whitlam’s epic handful of sand.' (Introduction)

'Charlie Ward’s A Handful of Sand is an epic historical work, meticulously researched and beautifully written, with at its heart the events that shaped the lives of the Gurindji in the lead-up and aftermath of the historic walk-off. Ward takes us through the events in close detail that surround the iconic moment in 1975 when an Australian Prime Minister passed a ‘handful of sand’ to a Gurindji elder.'  (Introduction)