We are a week away from the second Creative Development weekend to be held in Geraldton on 24-28 February and I have been following up on information learned about the players involved in the project.

Peter Docker has had books published by Fremantle Press, which makes him a true son of WA. I was lucky, I found one, Sweet One (2014) in the Jurien Bay Library. I liked it so much, that on my next trip to Perth I spent a few hours trawling through the ‘D’ section at the Elizabeth Bookshop main warehouse in Fremantle. It took me an hour, but I found a copy of both Sweet One and Somebody Else’s Country (2005).

Sweet One is an outback noir crime novel, streets ahead of many of the books I have read in the genre. Set in a barely disguised fictional Kalgoorlie, the crime against an Elder that begins the action is one that will resonate horribly for many WA folk. What follows is a many-threaded story of mayhem led by an Aboriginal man highly trained in the Australian military who goes AWAL from his post in Afghanistan and comes back to his country to avenge the Elder’s death. It’s hard to put down, with an intense plot and satisfyingly mystical components. The mysterious Sweet One, a settler journalist called Issy, various military and police personnel, and a wonderful young Aboriginal woman carry a complex plot that lays bare the good, the bad and the downright ugly aspects of Aboriginal and settler life in contemporary outback WA.

I learned something of how Aboriginal people live behind the headlines, and something of the workings of the grinding ugliness of systemic racism. It’s a wonderful book, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Ned Kelly Award (I remarked to Peter, if it wasn’t won by Peter Temple, then he was robbed).

Somebody Else’s Country is very different. It follows Peter’s life as an actor on stage on in films both created and performed by Indigenous and settler colleagues. It is a young man’s story, driven by plenty of hard-on-the-liver living as he navigates his way between Melbourne and other urban centres and remote Australian film sets. In historical performances he finds himself playing the white settler with the gun – crosshairs fixed on Aboriginal people – a role he finds increasingly uncomfortable as he is drawn into deep friendships and alliances with Indigenous creatives and becomes aware of the level of racism his friends deal with on a daily basis. Like Sweet One, this book, written in the vernacular, is a gift for settler people who have no insight into the reality of Indigenous lives, and who are attempting to lift their heads out of the great white sands of silence they were born into.