Let no-one say the past is dead. The past is all about us and within.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), 1970

 We are now in a time when the race crimes of the past that shored up colonisation, chattel slavery, and segregation can be more safely unravelled. Those of us whose families have been on the ‘wrong side’ of the colour line can discover the forces shaping our families and ourselves. Only in the past two decades or so have the veils of false respectability and dubious notions of human difference based on race been lifted sufficiently to allow a focus on the history of mixed-race family formations. Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (1998) was a joyous discovery for me, a mixed-race Aboriginal Australian who recognised the same pattern, every generation having both black and white relations in our families.¹