Dougy is a young Aboriginal boy. "I'm nobody much," he thinks of himself. But when his little outback town erupts in violence and the brooding river breaks its banks, isolating the townsfolk, it is Dougy who must save his sister, Gracey.
(One magazine reviewer said this story had the most tense and exciting climax of any book he had read in years. Everyone reads the last fifty pages without stopping.)
I wrote this story in 1990 and having recently re-read it for the new edition, I was surprised at how little it has dated. At the same time, it saddens me that many of the difficulties that Dougy faces still exist for boys like him nearly twenty year later. The reasons for this don't all lie in the failure of Government policies and programs.
