Don Watson on a window into Australia's past and present in 'The Passion of Private White'

'The Passion of Private White' describes the meeting of two worlds: that of the intensely driven anthropologist Neville White, and the world of hunter-gatherer clans in remote northern Australia with whom he has lived and worked for half a century, mapping their culture and history in breathtaking detail. As White began to understand this ancient culture struggling between the demands of Western modernity and the equally pressing need to preserve their lands, customs, laws and language, he was also trying to transcend the mental scars inflicted on the battlefields of Vietnam. When White began taking his old platoon mates to the homeland, two wildly different groups found in each other some of the solutions and some of the therapy they both needed. This book is the result of Don Watson's has had his own fifty-year relationship with Neville White: it is a towering achievement, a profound insight into both our recent and our deep history, the coloniser and colonised. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Don Watson about his fifty-year friendship with Neville White, what brought Neville White to study the clans of North-Eastern Arnhem Land and the moment Neville crossed the line from scientific observer to activist and advocate for a nation of people struggling between competing demands.