Reviews of Trustees on Trial: Recovering the stolen wages

Alan Gold, Good Reading, February 2007
It is a scandal of breathtaking proportions. Kidd is to be congratulated for demanding that our governments must be held to the same depth of accountability as they would demand of any financial institution taking and dealing with public funds.

Helen Burrows, Indigenous Law Bulletin, February 2007
Dr Kidd’s assertions are cogent and compelling. With the support documentary evidence she references, lawyers would be able to put forward a persuasive case against governments…Trustees on Trial: Recovering the Stolen Wagesis a harrowing account of Australia’s enduring past, painstakingly and courageously researched and engagingly written by one of Australia’s most informed authorities.

Margaret Wenham, Courier Mail, February 2007
All those who don’t want to believe that Aborigines were and are denied the same human and legal rights as white people and who don’t understand why many Aboriginal families continue to live in poverty, should read Trustees on Trial. First among them should be Australia’s No.1 public official — a man very fond of dismissing what he calls the black armband view of Australian history, Prime Minister John Howard.

June McGowan, Law Society Journal, February 2007
Currently, we are told of the importance of Australian values, one of which is said to be the ‘fair go’. Trustees on Trial is one example of how that purported value might be more a matter of political spin than fact.

Regina Ganter, Australian Historical Studies, 39, 2008
This book seeks to fill the gaps of public education that the Queensland government failed to undertake when, as a result of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry at Palm Island in 1996, it offered compensation to workers illegally underpaid by government…Kidd has now become an activist for Aboriginal rights and continues to draw on her black and white evidence to demolish the claims occasionally made by the Queensland government about its benevolent intentions or beneficent effect in Aboriginal Administration.