Mount Barker, its surrounding environs and proliferating estates, might be situated in volcanic territory for all the ferocious eruptions of violence that occur in Rebekah Clarkson’s collection of stories, Barking Dogs. The demographic is noticeably white Australian. In ‘Dancing on Your Bones’, a loathsome consultant suggests the government develop the Summit – a sacred site – in response to a native title claim and name it ‘Peramangk Estate’. The physical absence of other ethnicities is stark throughout Clarkson’s book; even the Summit itself seems invisible to those living at its base.