Pastor Doug

The Story of an Aboriginal Leader

by Mavis Thorpe Clark

Lansdowne Press, 1965, [First Edition], black and white photographic plates, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, previous owners’ inscription on front endpaper, dustjacket shows a little edge and shelf wear with a little rubbing, bumping and chipping to edges and corners (see photographs)

“Doug Nicholls, whose story is told in this book, is one of the few Aborigines who have ever succeeded in making the very difficult adjustment needed for living in the society of white Australians.  Yet Nicholls’ early life seemed to hold out no more promise than that of most other Aborigines.  He was born in 1906 at Cumeroogunga, a New South Wales Aboriginal station, where he received just enough education to make him barely literate, and at the age of fourteen he was thrust into the world to earn his living as an unskilled labourer. As he himself says, with his background he might easily have become, like so many of his race, a derelict living in a river-bank humpy on the fringe of a white man’s town.”