One Bright Spot

VICTORIA HASKINS was born in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1967 and lived in the East Kimberley in Western Australia as a child, until moving to Sydney, New South Wales as a teenager. She was educated at Ku-Ring-Gai High School and the University of Sydney. Having worked in bookshops for many years, Victoria moved to the North Coast of New South Wales to run a travelling bookshop there, when she discovered the papers on which this book is based.Later, Victoria worked as a curator of Australian Social History at the National Museum of Australia, in Canberra, before taking up a History lectureship at Flinders University in South Australia. Victoria now lives in Adelaide with her partner, Indigenous historian John Maynard, and their three children. This is her first book.

• Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: More Than My Own Mother to Me PART I: MARY My One Bright Spot All Girls Shall Leave the Reserves If I Am Coming Back to You All Again PART II: ALMA So Desperately Hard to Understand A Better Chance PART III: DEL Was Fearfully Shocked This Afternoon A Perfect Farce She Loves Pretty Things and Knows How to Wear Them You Must Not Go Against These People There is a Lot of Dark Girls That Went Through It And So We Are 'Slave Owners' It Makes Me Rage A Devotion I Hope I May Fully Repay PART IV: PEARL GIBBS Just Ordinary Justice The Stone of Anthropology Miss Pink Wants My Help PART V: JANE A Free Australian Citizen The Bitter Disappointment of Trying to Help Then We Must All Be Insane Epilogue: She Learnt Her Lessons Well A Note on Sources Notes Bibliography Index

'Victoria Haskins' fine book fills a much-needed gap in our understanding of Australia's history. For too long we have heard the stories of one side or the other; colonised or colonisers. One Bright Spot delicately rounds out our understanding by revealing to us the complexity of the relationships that emerged through the cross-cultural interactions of the early part of the twentieth century. The evocative prose resists sentimentality and romanticisation and delights the reader with an exquisite novel-like writing style. At the end of it one is struck by Haskins' rare combination of scholarly rigor, passion and a personal connection, which she both embraces and critiques'. Professor Lynette Russell, Monash University