A strange hybrid object: part novel, part screenplay, part meta-fictional performance about image, authorship, adaptation, and Aboriginal representation.

Framed around the making — or unmaking — of a film called Wildcat Falling, it moves through industry politics, identity, self-mythology, and the cultural machine that wants to package it. Even before the later controversies around Mudrooroo’s identity, the book already reads as unstable in an interesting way: theatrical, self-conscious, and wary of every authority that tries to fix meaning in place.

It sits at an odd intersection of Indigenous literature, film culture, textual experiment, and late twentieth-century arguments about authenticity and mediation. As an object it also has real period presence: small-press Australian hardback, distinctive jacket, and a title that feels rooted in a very specific local cultural moment without becoming inert.

Hyland House hardback, first edition, 1988. Near fine condition.