Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier by Darrell Lewis

by
September 2012, no. 344

A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier by Darrell Lewis

Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 342 pp, 9781921867262

A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier by Darrell Lewis

by
September 2012, no. 344

Darrell Lewis first encountered the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory in 1971 when he worked as a field assistant for the Bureau of Mineral Resources. ‘There was an aura about the country which fired my imagination,’ he writes. Since then, as an historian and archaeologist, he has become an authority on the Victoria River District, the land, its history, and its rock art. Now a research fellow at the National Museum of Australia’s Centre for Historical Research, he has worked on one of its interactive online projects, the ‘Victoria River Doomsday Book’, described as ‘a compendium of Victoria River District cattle station histories and biographies of station employees’. A Wild History is a product of that lifelong commitment, but it is no mere paean of praise: indeed, Lewis soberly declares his intention of replacing the ‘wild imaginings’ and tall stories that currently hold sway with a more soundly based ‘wild history’.

John Rickard reviews 'A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier' by Darrell Lewis

A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier

by Darrell Lewis

Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 342 pp, 9781921867262

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.