Sort of a Place Like Home: Remembering the Moore River Native Settlement

Set amongst the low scrub of the Mogumber sand plain north of Perth, the Moore River Native Settlement was, for 30 years, ‘sort of a place like home’ for thousands of Aboriginal people. Alternately sanctuary, work camp, orphanage, prison and rural idyll, the settlement was part of a bold social experiment by the Chief Protector of Aborigines A.O. Neville, the aim of which was nothing less than the total eradication of a race and a culture. Making extensive and imaginative use of oral resources and hitherto unseen documents, Susan Maushart paints a vivid and intimate picture of the life experience of Moore River inmates. She documents the appalling bureaucratic incompetence, official indifference and occasional outright brutality that made Moore River notorious.