Whitefella Way is the highly-anticipated sequel to the award-winning Cage of Ghosts, a nuanced and scholarly work of ‘unusual originality’, published in 2018.
Photographer and writer Jon Rhodes again takes the reader on nine vivid and richly illustrated journeys as he examines the intertwined histories of blackfellas and whitefellas at the Eora rock engravings on Grotto Point and Balls Head in Sydney. At the grave of Yuranigh south of Molong, and the tumulus of the ‘Black Chief’ west of Condobolin, both in Wiradjuri country. To Black Jimmy’s grave at the Bellingen Cemetery, in Gumbaynggirr country. To the Armidale Folk Museum in Nganyaywana country on the New England Tableland. To the Bundjalung bora ground in the Tucki Tucki General Cemetery south of Lismore. And to the Gubbi Gubbi stone-walled fish trap at Sandstone Point on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
In the final chapter Rhodes investigates the mass killing of Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, Kaytej and Warumungu in the Northern Territory – the 1928 Coniston Massacre – and again asks, when will the fundamental truth of the 140-year-long Australian Frontier War be wholeheartedly acknowledged and memorialised by the government of the Commonwealth of Australia?
