In a recent conversation the novelist Alex Miller told me he thought people who claimed that they hadn't known, until relatively recently, that Aboriginal children had been forcibly removed from their families were lying. I didn't have the heart to tell him that, until the publication of Bringing Them Home in 1997, my own ignorance about Aboriginal-child removal had not been feigned but real. Like very many Australians, I was shocked, moved and ashamed when I read its account of the systematic decades-long practice of separating Aboriginal children of mixed descent from their mothers, families and communities, and of the physical and psychic suffering so many had endured, as a consequence, for the remainder of their lives. This was a chapter of recent Australian history I had not taken the trouble to understand.