His prose, powerfully imaginative, unflinchingly honest, rich in imagery and alive with comic ironies, takes the reader into the Aborigines’ world and there provides new and profound insights into the richness of their culture, and timelessness of their traditions, the clear-minded simplicity of their values.

And their reader is held, within the increasingly oppressive and threatening atmosphere of this time of upheaval, brutality and injustice, by a complex balance of sympathies, subtly woven.

The enormity of the gulf that existed between the black and the white man’s world is strikingly captured early in the novel. Before the coming of the white man the worst ‘evil’ the child Wooreddy could envisage happening to him, is that he encounter a ‘scale fish’, a ‘dangerous’ thing that could bring ‘evil luck’. Like all Bruny Islanders, Wooreddy believes that ‘evil’, or ‘Ria Warrawah’,

 He, or she, or it, was the sea and lived in the sea from which it sent manifestations as well as tidal waves to harm the land and those who lived on the land.

We accept, readily, the child’s inability to comprehend the coming of the white men except in terms of his tribal myths and legends. And it is symbolic, and effectively so, that Johnson has Wooreddy’s first sighting of the white man’s ships happen after he has experienced the worst horror his world holds for him.

He gave an extra-long bound and landed on something slimy, something eerily cold and not of the earth. Desperately he sprang away as his eyes clenched shut to keep out the horrible sight. He marched seven steps chanting a spell, then gave a yelp of despair. The last step had brought his big toe against something slimy, something eerily cold and not of this earth – and worse, it was spiky and wriggled. It was alive! He began to tremble violently. Ria Warrawah wrapped him in a transparent mist. He was lost! His hands shut out the world as his mind desperately searched through remembered snatches of half-understood conversations in an effort to find a potent spell. He tried a string of words. As the last one left his lips, there came a strange moaning from the sea, then gruff voices speaking in strange tongues which were followed by a sharp crack that made the water heave and lap at his feet. By magic his eyes clicked open to focus in a fixed stare on what had come from the sea. It was an omen, an omen, he knew – but what came from the ocean was evil, and so it was an evil omen. His eyes remained fixed on it. Shapes of thick fog congealed over dark rocks, or a small island which foaled a travesty of the firm earth.

Gentle humour gives the passage an immediacy and we are convinced that for Wooreddy, innocence and freedom are replaced instantly by an intuitive knowledge of an evil capable of destroying his world.

Nothing from this time on could ever be the same – and why? Because the world was ending! This truth entered his brain and the boy, the youth, and finally the man would hold onto it …

This certainty, and the sense of hopelessness it entails, makes understandable and tragic Wooreddy’s submissive attitude towards white oppression and his willingness to accept the ‘missionary’ Robinson as ‘friend’ and ‘Protector’.

One of the novel’s greatest achievements is the creation of this character, George Augustus Robinson, a man who believes himself,

... destined by God to make the Aborigines the most interesting and profitable part of his life.

Throughout the novel he is known with intensifying irony, as ‘Fader’, ‘Ballawine’ (red-ochre), ‘The Great Conciliator’ ‘The Protector of Aborigines’, and finally as ‘Commandant’. Comically drawn, this morally insensible, but astonishingly energetic little ’do- gooder’, determines to collect, civilize, and save for the Lord, those Aborigines who have so far managed to escape slaughter.

We see him for the first time through Wooreddy’s eyes.

The aborigine waited for the strange intruder to reach him. The num was short with a soft body plump from many days of good eating without hunting. Short, stubby legs marched that pot-bellied trunk over the sand with dainty, precise steps lacking the finesse of the hunter ... The ghost’s face, round like the moon, though unscarred, shone pink like the shoulder skin of the early morning sun. Sharp, sea-coloured eyes sought to bridge the gap between them.

Wooreddy, Trugernanna, and eventually even the less trusting Ummarrah, believe that Mr Robinson is ‘different’ from other ‘nums’. He disapproves of violence and rape and manages to convey a genuine concern for their well-being and survival. Wooreddy is prepared to persuade his people.

He is as good a num as there can be. He won't harm you or let others harm you.

Faced with eventual annihilation and the inevitable disintegration of their cultures, the Aboriginal people could only hope that their ‘Great Conciliator’ would indeed ‘deliver’ them to a ‘promised land’, a place where they could again live in ‘comfort’ and ‘at case’. But at the settlement,

Death was the central fact of their lives – the steady placing of bodies into the cold ground in the Christian way. No more smoke to waft a spirit warmly on its way as in the olden days.

Confronted on every side with despair, disease, and the certain death of every ‘poor savage’ he has ‘saved’, the Protector of Aborigines can only cling, blindly, rigidly, to his belief.

His programme of work and learning together with cleanliness and Christian morality would solve the problem.

While Wooreddy, depicted as a ‘man of theory’, saw little point in railing against white oppression, Ummarrah, a ‘man of action’, who belonged to the ‘Stony Creek Nation’, believed that

... freedom was everything and survival in a hostile world worth nothing.

Ummarrah finds Wooreddy’s passive acceptance of his fate difficult to understand yet he recognizes in the man a ‘deep sorrow’, the result of

... the successive deaths, the loss of his land, the urge to survive ...

Wooreddy and Trugernanna believe that they know what Ummarrah does not yet understand, that

The old ways and customs were dead or dying and without this underlying stratum things had little meaning.

This knowledge, we realize, is their tragedy, yet their spirits, suppressed through enforced subjection to white man’s notions of civilized behaviour, respond readily to Ummarrah’s enthusiastic attempt to ‘unite the tribal remnants into some sort of community’, and the moment the ‘commandant got into his boat’, the Aborigines began their last proud ceremony.

The following passage captures something of the devastating loss to pride which settlement living caused.

Fires blazed in the four quarters to illuminate the circles. Another blazed in the middle of the eastern edge and at this sat Ummarrah. He got to his feet and directed operations. They freed themselves of their mission clothing and began painting their bodies with the white chalk they had taken from Robinson's school house. They outlined their manhood scars in red so they stood out to show their degrees of initiation. No women or children were present. Next they smeared red ochre grease over their cropped heads. What shame they felt when their compared their bald heads with Ummarrah's luxuriant locks which writhed about his face like tamed serpents!

We respond to Ummarrah’s vital sense of his culture and his refusal to acknowledge that it will die with the people. But as Robinson goes to ‘save’ the Aborigines, yet again, it is Wooreddy and Trugernanna who know that they dance in the face of certain betrayal, of inevitable annihilation. The ceremony provides the novel with some positive and powerful moments, moments we remember ...

The thighs of the dancers quivered as their feet struck the earth again and again. They tapped their fingers on pieces of bark making the pitter- patter of the gentler rain. Darkness swept over the earth and from the stormy darkness came stalking the ghosts that have no home. The slaves of Ria Warrawah came forth from the darkness. With skins the colour of bark ash they lurched into the circle, stumbling around seemingly blind. Ummarrah did not lead them. He sat at the side of Wooreddy ready to take over the singing. The good doctor would lead this part of the ceremony. Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World

is an exceptional novel. Every Australian should read it.