THE MARGINS OF SUBURBIA Zora Simic, University of New South Wales The City’s Outback, by Gillian Cowlishaw (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009, 272pp, $39.95pb). Publisher’s websites: www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9781921410871.htm In the year 2000, over 200 000 people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of Reconciliation. Sydney also hosted the Olympics, with official celebrations showcasing Indigenous arts and culture. Midnight Oil took to the stage at the closing ceremony with ‘Sorry’ emblazoned on their outfits; this was a protest clearly directed at the then Prime Minister John Howard who had made it known an official Apology to the Stolen Generations was not on his agenda. An Aboriginal Tent Embassy was set up at the Olympic site, with another in Victoria Park, not far from anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw’s Glebe home. In that same year, Cowlishaw began ethnographic research in Sydney’s ‘disavowed subordinated self’, Mt Druitt in the western suburbs. The title of her latest book, The City’s Outback, refers to the fact that Australia’s largest concen- tration of Aboriginal people live in the Blacktown area that includes Mt Druitt. Yet the lives of Mt Druitt’s Indigenous population – like the lives of most urban Aborigines – remain ‘largely unknown’. This is a book about getting to know some of Mt Druitt’s Aboriginal people and some of the pleasures, frustrations and obstacles inherent in the encounter between a privileged white academic and members of a community that defies coherence and categorisation, apart from perhaps ‘marginal’. Cowlishaw, one of Australia’s foremost anthropologists, also stakes a strong claim for her discipline, which she convincingly argues has been both justifiably and unfairly maligned in respect to its alleged complicity in Indigenous oppression. A lot has happened in Aboriginal affairs since 2000, but a decade on, Cowlishaw’s account of her time in Mt Druitt does not read as dated. Rather, The City’s Outback is driven by an ur- gency and relevance that is often lacking in historical scholarship. These qualities emerge as a result of the material itself and Cowlishaw’s reflexive approach to the research and writing process. Her somewhat unclassifiable book – a ‘proper’ ethnographic monograph on Mt Druitt is forth- coming – is rich in reflection and detail about ‘everyday Aboriginality’ and its irreconcilability with official politics and what have now become ‘official’ narratives about the Aboriginal past and present. These include the Stolen Generations and what at one point seemed to be the inter- minable History Wars. In one particularly powerful chapter titled ‘History hurts’, Cowlishaw interviews ‘Annette’ (most people she interviewed preferred a pseudonym) who, along with her siblings, became a ward of the state after her mother was declared ‘negligent’. She was 13. Some siblings went to white foster parents, others to homes or, if they were old enough, were sent to work. At the age of 21, having worked for only board and clothing for eight years, Annette was ‘free’ to return to the mission, but ‘I didn’t feel welcome there so they moved me on’. Annette eventually had children and grandchildren of her own, but worries about ‘something inside me that sort of stops me from showing all the love that I want, to my kids and grandkids’. One of her sisters was murdered and her favourite brother is in jail for life. She appeals to Cowlishaw to lobby on his behalf and the anthropologist is relieved when nothing comes of it, ‘as I can see BOOK REVIEWS HISTORY AUSTRALIA, VOLUME 7, NUMBER 2, 2010 MONASH UNIVERSITY EPRESS 47.1