Not many white Australians would consider making a personal reconciliation with Aboriginal people they had known only superficially 40 years ago.

Enter Amanda Webster, who spent her early childhood in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where her father was a doctor, as his father had been. Her best friend at school, she claimed, was an Aboriginal girl called Bronwyn who lived on a local mission station.

By Webster’s middle years she had taken to writing as a new career, after having qualified as a doctor. At a writers’ retreat for mostly American women in Hawaii she was castigated by one of them for endorsing Australia’s welfare system when the country’s Indigenous people were treated like second-class citizens.

That set Webster thinking, guiltily, about Indigenous people in Australia, their health and social problems, and her question as a six-year-old to her father: ‘Are Aboriginals people?’

This book, about her search for the Aboriginal people she knew as a child and her personal reparations to them, is based on a search for understanding of skin colour and how people allow such arbitrary differences to determine their relationships.

In trawling for information about the Kurrawang Mission outside Kalgoorlie, Webster found bureaucratic details of how Aboriginal people were treated in Western Australia, including by early members of her own family.

After contacting Greg Ugle, a man who had written a memoir about being brought up at that mission, Webster started navigating the tricky landscape of Aboriginal family relationships, desperately trying to prove that her early friendships could endure, despite a great gulf between her wealth and privilege and the conditions of her friend Bronwyn, who had weathered a tough, tragic life and was living in the bush.

Webster believes that to hurt someone else is to hurt oneself, making a tear in the soul through which one’s humanity leaks. So she considers that she belongs to a group that is hurting because it has hurt another group of people. Healing for her had to be a two-way event, in which Greg and Bronwyn extended friendship and Webster not only said ‘sorry’ but made reparations.

Webster makes no apologies for her actions or the way she thinks. She provides a wealth of information about the effect of bureaucratic institutions on the lives of Aboriginal people past and present, the motivations of the mission workers and her own dilemmas.

It’s a thought-provoking book about the harm done to Aboriginal people by white settler Australians, but it does not pretend to have universal answers. Webster ruefully admits that a bit more knowledge of Aboriginal customs would have sometimes proved more useful than a truckload of good intentions, but at least she does now have some Aboriginal friends.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville