Monica Furlong has done an exceptional job of accurately describing the people and conditions in Balgo (Wirrumanu), Australia’s most remote Aboriginal community. For the last four years that I lived in Australia, I was privileged to have been counted among the friends of Margaret Bumblebee (Yintjurra Naparula), Senior Law Woman (Elder) and noted artist. We communicated as one grandmother to another, neither of us having an easy time of understanding the other. And she gave me my name, Yurrungarli Nagala, “my mother’s mother, the youngest one,” she said. With other kartiya (white women), in 2009 I was invited to participate in Law Camp, dancing with, eating with, and listening to the stories told by Balgo’s women Elders.

Furlong has taken me one step further. In retrospect, she has enriched my experience with her careful research and reporting about the culture and spiritual beliefs of the indigenous Australians who have chosen to live isolated from white Australia’s cities and towns. She has answered for me questions I didn’t know to ask, as well as filling in so many of the blanks in my knowledge.

There are other books, but I doubt any of them are a match for Furlong’s Flight of the Kingfisher for accuracy and a sincere effort to compassionately understand these people who belong to the land where their ancestors have lived for 60,000 years or more. With her easygoing, straightforward prose and skills of a professional writer of the first order, I feel the heat of the summer sun, the taste of the red dirt stirred by a whiff of wind, the sound of the women laughing as they greet one another in a native tongue or the Aboriginal English they use to communicate with other language groups. Furlong has brought all this to life, offering me the opportunity to return for a visit any time I wish. ( )