Ordinary people at Jackson’s Track
The book Jackson’s Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime Place, by Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon, is a story of ordinary Australian people—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—living together under difficult circumstances, and worth a read.
The book tells of Daryl Tonkin’s life at Jackson’s Track in the Gippsland region of south-eastern Victoria. He and his older brother Harry arrived there in 1936,The theme is a rural adventure covering about four decades, a story of family drama and conflict, inter-racial love and prejudice, the decline of an Aboriginal community, and the deliberate destruction by white officialdom of a culture and a way of life
Since being published in 2000, Jackson’s Track has sold more than 60,000 copies.
Co author Carolyn Landon has come back to the events of the story to examine them again.
In Jackson’s Track Revisited, the voices of Aboriginal people who lived at the Track mingle with those of the White Australians who tried to ‘improve’ their lives in the 1950s, an era of assimilation.
As of September 2008, Jackson’s Track Revisited has become “open access”, meaning that the online version of this book is now available for free. To read Jackson’s Track Revisited online, go to MonashUniversity. Please see accessing content for further information.
There’s also a good interview with Carolyn Landon about both books at the State Library of Victoria web site