A striking black-and-white photograph on the front cover of Oodgeroo implacable and wise. And then the publisher’s blurb on the back cover:

Oodgeroo – poet, human rights activist, conservationist, educator, artist – proudly saluted her people’s heritage, whose ‘long making’ was ‘so much of the past’, and gladly beckoned a brighter future. A great and passionate voice of Aboriginal Australia, she left the world a legacy of hope.

All this fills the reviewer with some trepidation when approaching Kathie Cochrane’s biography of Oodgeroo/Kath Walker.