Where Strange Gods Call

by A. M. Duncan-Kemp

W. R. Smith & Paterson, 1968 [First Edition], colour frontispiece, colour and b/w plates, illustrated end-papers, hardcover with embossed pictorial illustration, brown cloth, dustjacket,

Near Fine Condition, book has very minor edge and shelf wear, tight in binding, dustjacket has been priceclipped with minor edge and shelf wear, some rubbing to covers (see photographs)

'This book describes in rich and absorbing detail the Channel Country world of the author - the far south-west of Queensland and the north of South Australia where lie the mighty cattle kingdoms.
Few, apart from the Aborigines, know the Channel Country as does the author - its climates and its moods, its secret trails and the creatures that use them, its shadowy blue ranges and its rugged stony slopes, its maze of water-bearing streams and gullies - in good seasons the far-from-simple network of irrigation channels provided by Nature to carry silt and seed and water across the land, its shy tribesmen who lived in three worlds, ruled by strange gods, self-contained but connected by spirit-links all rigidly inaccessible except to the initiate and those favoured few white folk who know the Aborigines well.
In its dangers and discomforts, and above all in the unwritten laws of its wild society, she finds a deep personal fulfillment.  in early youth her father told her: "You will always be alone, but not lonely, Loneliness can be a communion."
William Duncan's strangely attractive personality is unforgettably caught up in these pages so understandingly written by his daughter.  So is the country itself (called "desert", but which is totally unlike any other desert in the world) and the ways of the creatures among which the author has spent so much of her life.'