As I write this review, Stan Grant’s name is everywhere as the media and the public absorb his decision to step aside from compèring ABC Television’s Q&A after citing the cumulative wear and tear on him and his family of weeks of online racist abuse. Yet such is the pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that by the time this review appears, another episode in the seemingly never-ending racist diatribe against Australian First Nations peoples will have moved Grant off the front pages. The ‘trolls of the Twitter sewer’, as Grant calls them, will have found another target for their hatred and aggression.

Most First Nations people have long experience of the kind of cheap and nasty racism they espouse: muttered insults in the street; insults hurled from passing cars. The common or garden racists are part of the scenery of modern Australia and generally attract disdain rather than fear. Yet the possibility that empty threats might lead to deadly violence – witness the brutal and callous murders of Warren Braedon/Louis Johnson in 1992, and of Cassius Turvey in 2022, both teenagers from Perth – is a reminder that the streets of our cities and country towns are not safe places if you are young and black. Too many First Nations people have experienced overt racist violence to ignore its presence in White Australia.