Since Daryl Tonkin lived for decades with a rural Aboriginal community he is presented in the text as speaking with the authority of first-hand experience in his countering of these negative perceptions. The memoir is intended to promote greater understanding and sympathy for Aboriginal people while countering widespread negative perceptions. The memoir is meant to be a historical document that sheds light on Australian social history while promoting the cause of Aboriginal reconciliation.
It is set in the Gippsland forest in Victoria and it tells the story of a white Australian man (Tonkin) who ran a timber mill and married a local Aboriginal woman and lived in harmony in the bush with the local Aborigines up Jackson’s Track. Euphemia Mullett was with those people attracted to the promise of work at Jackson’s Track, and she would go on to live there for over thirty years as Tonkin’s wife.Daryl Tonkin’s memoir Jackson’s Track (1999) was written with significant assistance from Carolyn London. During this time, an Aboriginal community of over 150 people established itself at Jackson’s Track, setting up camp in the forest and working for Tonkin, felling timber for the mill. Jackson’s Track is instead the memoir of the white man in the photograph, Daryl Tonkin, who owned land and a timber mill at Jackson’s Track, West Gippsland, for over forty years from the mid-1930s. The striking cover photograph the 1940s of Euphemia Mullett in high-heeled shoes and light summer dress, standing beside a white man and his horse in a forest clearing suggested it, as did the reference to the dreamtime in the book’s title. When I first picked up a copy of Jackson’s Track: A memoir of a Dreamtime place (Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon, Viking 1999), I expected to find the life story of an Aboriginal woman.
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