Tears of strangers. Stan Grant. 2004.

Journalist Stan Grant was born in 1963, a son of the Wiradjuri people. By the early sixties these once proud warriors were scattered onto mission camps and the fringes of rural towns. Growing up a Wiradjuri, a tribe ravaged by alcoholism, poverty, abuse and neglect, the young Stan was more familiar with broken glass and mangy dogs than with dot paintings and corroborees.

Yet, while acknowledging the cliched bleakness that was part of his childhood. Grant celebrates the resilience of his family. He champions his sawmiller father - a man whose life is written on his body. A man who lumped logs three times his size at any mill where he could find work and whose missing fingers were a sign of escape not carelessness. He proudly describes his mother - a wiry and tough woman who fell in love with a wild black man, had three children under three years old and who made sure her children’s plates were full by keeping hers empty........