Long Ago and Here Now in Yuendumu by Frank Baarda

Long Ago and Here Now, Frank Baarda's companion work to his memoir, My Yuendumu Story, reads like a vastly expanded version of his musical dispatches, complete with soundtrack, and the insertion of elegant poetic fragments written by his wife Wendy.

Personal, political, discursive, digressive, opinionated, erudite, passionate, partisan - the adjectives proliferate - Baarda's voice is that of a born raconteur. Whether fleshing out his personal history through the story of his remarkable parents and his childhood in Argenta, riffing on the irreconcilable contradictions between the Warlpiri world view and the government agencies that attempt to manage its manifestations, or pursuing a fleeting distraction down a random rabbit hole, he is always entertaining, frequently funny, and at times, subversively profound.

This is a story no-one else could tell, told by a great storyteller.

- Kim Mahood