Black and white and inbetween

Arthur Dimer’s life has been that of the bushman – horse and camel breaker, shepherd, shearer, boundary rider and overseer, and later underground mine worker at Norseman, then Shire and Main Roads plant operator. Yet as a man whose grandmothers were full-decent women of the Ngadju and Mirning peoples – the traditional inhabitants of the south-west Nullarbor region – he is also an integral part of a much older system of law and land ownership which has been damaged but not destroyed by the advent there since the 1870s of Europeans including his own grandfathers. It is this wider pattern of change incorporating Arthur’s own story which he and Peter Gifford evoke in this singular narrative – part biography, part social history involving historical figures such as Daisy Bates and A.O Neville.