The pastoral frontier continues to be a site for stories of nation-building. In Mary Anne Jebb’s and Bill Bunbury’s books, the stories are not so much ‘how we got the country started, boots and all and not half-hearted’, but about the limits of liberalism and questions of indigenous rights. Having worked for many years with eighteen Aboriginal ‘storytellers and key characters’, Jebb returns to the region evoked by Ion Idriess in Over the Range: Sunshine and Shadows in the Kimberley. In 1937 that travelogue–history sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. No apologist for colonisation, Jebb shows us its difficulties.