Saltwater is a memoir of sorts written by a Queensland lawyer. It recounts her time working for the Aboriginal Legal Service in North Queensland.

But after the charming flashback to a childhood visit to Palm Island with which the book starts, I read with a sense of mounting frustration.

For a start, there are no dates. It’s possible to deduce that the author was on Palm Island and in Townsville about 20 years ago, but for how long is not clear. The absence of dates is interesting; it suggests that the situations described are somehow timeless, as if social conditions in North Queensland do not change, so dates are irrelevant.

Then there is the vast amount of dialogue. If this were a book of fiction, my criticism would be limited to how little insight any of this dialogue provides to motivation or the development of character or plot. But in a book that purports to be a true story, extensive dialogue is troubling, especially in a legal context. No-one I have ever met – and as a practising lawyer I’ve taken hundreds of statements – has the ability to accurately recall extensive private conversations verbatim.

The note from the author at the end of the book does acknowledge the need to change things to protect, for example, legal privilege. There is a big hint here that she has basically reconstructed most of it, albeit from diaries and transcripts. This is not a mere quibble because the book is presented as a memoir of what actually happened. And that affects the book’s value as a source for what it describes.

This is not to deny the value of her insight into the appalling social conditions that she observed nor her genuine desire to help. This reviewer just thinks the author has written neither good fiction nor good legal history. Which is a pity, because the stories she observed definitely need to be widely known.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen