Children of Arnhem's Kaleidoscope

It was hot. There was sudden stillness in the late afternoon air and the surface of the small waterhole shone with unnatural smoothness. Fresh pig tracks at water's edge suggested pigs just gone. Two bubbles popped to the surface near the edge of the pool; just decaying vegetation, said my mind. I should have smelt crocodile!

What is it about the Northern Territory that fascinates?

I have only to mention it’s name in conversation and people turn to listen.

Why, for 180 years, has it drawn people from all over to come, stay longer than they imagined and, often, never leave?

This book is a memoir of a family's life in a remote aboriginal community, in Australia's Northern Territory. The place Oenpelli,(now Gunbalanya) is near Kadadu National Park, made famous in Crocodile Dundee.

It is a memoir of growing up in one of the most isolated parts of Australia - in a small aboriginal missionary community in the Northern Territory, something the equivalent of the remote Canada or Alaska. It is the landscape featured in the movie Crocodile Dundee.

It is a story of my memories and love for this remote and beautiful place, in which I lived as a child then worked as an adult and of many NT characters who gave me the memories.It is also the story of me working as an adult across many parts of the NT and about the hardy, outlandish characters that inhabit this place.

It also tells of my own experience of surviving attack by a large crocodile in a remote swamp

It also provides a foundation for my novels in the Crocodile Spirit Dreaming Series. The places in these books are the places in which I lived and worked and many of the stories came little changed from people I knew.