For several years now, Nicolas Rothwell has travelled the length and breadth of Northern and Central Australia. This book collects published and unpublished writing from that time. It contains sundry tales of marvellous places, told in an inimitable style. There are profiles of mystics and artists, explorers and healers, accounts of desert journeys, ground-breaking pieces on art, politics, landscape and much more.

Many of the pieces concern WA subjects, such as the Pilbara region, the Jirrawun and Tjulyuru arts movements, the Gibson Desert and more.

It is also a book which coheres into a multifaceted unity, forming a literary portrait of places and communities – at once a kind of occasional travelogue and an evocation, a set of stories, an introduction to some recent Aboriginal art and a clear-eyed account of some unfolding catastrophes.