Andrew McMillan’s An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land examines the long, often violent and contradictory history of contact between Aboriginal communities and outsiders in Arnhem Land.

It contains a breadth of knowledge, through expedition journals, colonial records, oral history, journalism and his own decades of travelling through the region. It is careful, and diligent when covering the competing systems of knowledge meet. Including, Indigenous law, kinship and country against missionary, governmental and settler assumptions about land, authority and civilisation. McMillan doesn’t write from some imaginary neutral altitude; in this work, the outsider remains an outsider, and the book repeatedly returns to the problem of how one enters, interprets and writes about a place whose terms are not one’s own.

This revised edition includes additional material and a concluding chapter updating the original 2001 publication.

Edition / Condition: Niblock Publishing, Nightcliff, Northern Territory, 2007. Revised edition; 2008 reprint. Paperback. Light shelf wear and handling marks to covers, with minor edge wear. Internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition.