From the Book:

When this Aborigine boy was eight years old, he placed his hand next to his father’s handprint and spread apart his small brown fingers. Then he blew a chalky white powder between his fingers onto the wall. He is very proud to return and find his handprint on the rock wall.

This rock wall and many others like it in Australia are covered with handprints and a collection of figures: skeletal fish, darting kangaroos, and people on horseback. Aborigines, descendants of Australia’s first people, read their history in these paintings, some of which are more than thirty thousand years old.

Many paintings tell stories of the Aborigines’ love of the land and of how they and their ancestors have taken good care of the earth. Other, more recent paintings, tell of a terrible time when settlers came by ship with guns and took the land away from them. Today Aborigines continue to tell their stories with wall and tree-bark paintings.