Neville White, an accomplished anthropologist, was a unique champion for the Aboriginal people of Donydji in Arnhem land.

The Passion of Private White lays out in exquisite detail the texture of life in Donydji, and it creates some memorable portraits. The funny half-life of the anthropologist immersed in the group, but not part of it, is brilliantly captured.

Whitefella researchers engaging with Indigenous groups were accepted as enablers of European necessities, from water tanks to land rights. From when he joined the group to undertake research into their traditional lifestyle, White worked indefatigably to improve their lot.

White had a backstory as a conscript to the Vietnam war. Before he was 21 years old, and long before he was a well-regarded anthropologist, White was a private in 9 Platoon, seeing active service. The resulting mental scars never healed. In an effort to handle the post-traumatic symptoms for himself and his mates, White took the Vietnam vets to volunteer at Donydji - the book relates how this impacted the vets themselves, how it helped save lives and give meaning in a PTSD world. It proposes that the Yolgnu faced in slow motion, and on a societal scale, what the vets had experienced as individuals in their short and traumatic exposure to a colonial war.

The book draws a unique parallel between the corruption of colonial action in the settling of Australia and the decision to go to war in Vietnam. Damage was done to individuals who must live with its consequences, in two apparently very different contexts which turn out to have this much in common. In working at Donydji, the vets had limited aims - to build this house, this water tank. They worked in order to block out the intrusion of images and to dissipate the somatic flooding of PTSD, and to meet its chronic depression and rage.

Watson presents a picture over time of the enduring of the settlement at Donydji. He charts its evolving in response to the paucity of options offered to Indigenous people in the post-colonial wash up, including the compromises and the unavoidable ambivalences.

This is a timely account in the year of the Voice. Self-determination would be a huge boon to Aboriginal leaders at the local level who are facing the heartbreak of their powerlessness to perform their culturally-mandated roles.

But the book also meticulously documents the state of unreadiness: of Indigenous people to make decisions that are viable, of non-Indigenous people to adjust their expectations of viability.

White is eventually exhausted by the combined effort that kept the settlement together to the point where it might meet a future imagined by the Voice. Far from perfection, falling short in so many hoped-for measures-the school, the workshop, even the tractor-nevertheless, the anthropologist and his volunteer crew played an immense role, and more than many other paid non-Indigenous in the field.

What the story also shows is that non-Indigenous Australians will need to adjust their sets if they think self-determination happens without shortfalls, mismanagement and waste. Opportunities will be lost. Aims will be thwarted, and goals missed. Non-Indigenous Australia will need to prepare for that, because it is still giving by far the greater part of this horribly difficult task -to surmount the damage done in two centuries of colonisation - to the people eviscerated by it.

Watson is resolutely anti-Utopian. He portrays the community as tottering on the brink of chaos in the ever-present time of Yolgnu cosmology. Funnily enough, the trauma-sufferer has the same insistence of the past in the present, the same absence of the future in a continuous present extending over the horizon.

The one-way flow of time brings Donydji to what we call the historic present. The place abides - with whatever outlasts the withdrawing and injecting of funding, the funerals and mourning, the vandalism of sheds and houses, the stripping of vehicles and equipment for spare parts, the inept action of contractors, the making and withering of gardens, the coming and going from the towns of clan members, relatives, bureaucrats, experts, even politicians.

Within this incessant flow, the wonderful strength of this book emerges, to capture a chronology anathema to the developed first world. And to record the challenge facing Indigenous communities finding their place in a 21st century democratic nation without losing the unique but opposing qualities of Indigenous traditions.