In 1964 the British and Australian governments were about to test the British ‘Blue Streak’ rockets across remote South and West Australia. They considered this area to be empty desert, but to one seventeen-year-old woman and her family, this was ‘home’. This book tells the story of the removal of the small group of Martu Aboriginal women and children from the Percival Lakes region of Australia's Western Desert – a group which had not previously had contact with European society. The story of the encounter and removal is told by Yuwali (that same seventeen-year-old), and two patrol officers, one of whom, Walter MacDougall, was later condemned ‘for having placed the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations.’

Besides presenting Yuwali's compelling recollection of events, the authors place this first encounter within the context of the political outrage, the public outcry, and the battles in the corridors of government at the time, forcing us to consider not only the consequences for the Martu of removal from the desert, but also the wider issue of Indigenous people's relationship to their lands.