212 pages; 12 photos

$AUD40.00

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In Trustees on Trial Kidd unpicks official dealings on huge trust funds compiled from private Aboriginal savings and enterprise, casting the evidence in terms of national and international cases relating to government accountability for Indigenous interests.  She argues the Queensland government should be held to the same standards of accountability and redress as any major financial institution.

Perhaps the greatest value of Trustees on Trial is to lay bare the historical record of financial mismanagement and the moral failure of previous Queensland Governments to act on evidence of systematic underpayment, fraud and suspect dealings with trust moneys.

….The book gives justification for the often expressed view that the issue of stolen wages is one of the great scandals of Australia's history….[The book] should be read by every non-Indigenous person in Australia so that they can understand the continuing resentment and frustration simmering within Indigenous communities over the Stolen Wages. ...(more)

John von Doussa, President HREOC Australia 

Trustees on Trial  roars with the injustices inflicted on Indigenous people through the withholding of their wages…Dr Kidd gives us example after example of monies wrongfully withheld, misplaced and misappropriated by officialdom under the Protection Acts….The full history of what actually happened in the lives of Indigenous Australians needs to be told if we as a nation are ever to properly understand the historical relationship between Indigenous Australians and the white majority…Dr Kidd has exposed yet another failure of contemporary Australia to fully understand and come to grips with past injustices on terms acceptable to Indigenous people…  …(more)

Danny Gilbert, Managing partner Gilbert + Tobin 

390 pages;   19 photographs   

The Way We Civilise is a groundbreaking work of historical importance revealing the inside story of how successive Queensland governments controlled the lives of Aboriginal people.  Based primarily on previously unseen official documents, this is a disturbing indictment of government powers into the late 1980s.

The department’s history, traced in this disturbing, meticulously detailed and coolly impassioned book, provokes in the reader feelings of stupefaction, vexation and fascinated horror… An archival book.  It is also a book of sharp political significance…

Nicholas Rothwell, Weekend Australian 

Kidd’s technique does not allow opportunistic, politically motivated distortion.  It is the authentic voices of the white administrators we hear, and that is enough … It is as yet the only comprehensive history of state policy we have.  You ought to read it.

Inga Clendinnen, 1999 Boyer Lectures

[Ros Kidd was given] open access to Government files, ticking away like a dusty time-bomb…The ultimate outcome was the detonation of that bomb in the publication of Kidd's blistering The Way We Civilize in 1997. Its reverberations are still being felt.

Raymond Evans, Politics and Culture

Kidd’s unprecedented access to sensitive state government documents has resulted in an immensely powerful and provocative account of the interplay of conflicting ideas and assumptions about the so-called ‘Aboriginal problem’.

Michael Meadows, Courier-Mail

This book mines previously restricted archival material dating back 150 years, to forge a chilling narrative of maladministration and systemic corruption.

Maggie Helass, Independent Monthly 

72 pages  $AUD25.00 ORDER

Written in 2000, Black Lives, Government Lies challenges Federal government claims that the policy to remove Aboriginal children from their parents was sparingly applied and only in the best interests of the child.
 

Kidd's compact, macrocosmic essay on 'the biggest social experiment in our history' - the removal and incarceration of tens of thousands of Aborigines, not only children, but people of several generations over a period of some seventy years … is a distillation of a litany of 'deliberate and persistent breaching of State and federal laws, of decimated community workforces, of devastated social fabric, of pathological overcrowding and jeopardised health'. 'How many preventable child deaths', Kidd asks: '[H]ow many beatings, stabbings, jailings and ruined lives are traceable to these carefully, knowingly implemented policies?'  [This short account] stings like a bee.

Raymond Evans, Politics and Culture

Kidd’s work dispels dominant myths of ‘good intentions’, ‘policies of the time’ and other rhetoric espoused by those unwilling to confront the atrocities of the past…The disparity between the way Aboriginal and white children were treated, particularly in the allocation of funding, is a serious indictment of policy makers…The flagrant disregard of labour laws and basic decency in the use of the Aboriginal workforce demonstrates an abuse of human and legal rights.

Linda Briskman, Australian Journal of Political Science 

For such a tiny book Black Lives, Government Lies by Rosalind Kidd packs a powerful punch and is a must-read for anyone interested in the living conditions endured by Indigenous people in Queensland from the late nineteenth century through to today…Dr Kidd has pieced together a shocking picture of abuse and neglect using the Queensland government’s own official and archival records, along with church records and letters from Indigenous workers, parents and children and letters from non-Indigenous pastoralists, missionaries, doctors, police and politicians…With a clear, concise, easy to read style and sledgehammer directness, Dr Rosalind Kidd adds another perspective to the written history of Indigenous people in Queensland.

Elizabeth Burrows, Koori Mail

This book demonstrates that there is indeed no gap between the historic deeds of previous governments and present circumstances … Dr Kidd is to be commended for so vividly demonstrating these connections between past and present, and for outlining some of the challenges that remain in addressing unfinished business.

William Jonas, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Commissioner, HREOC

Ros Kidd’s Black Lives, Government Lies is the essential introduction to Aboriginal realities in contemporary Australia….The book is powerful and quickly read, and will never been forgotten… I recommend that everyone read and re-read this indispensable little volume.