I don't know if I feel qualified to review this book, but I'll give it a go. 
 The narrator is a young Noongar boy named Bobby Wabalanginy. He acts as both narrator and the creator of myth. The story moves in a slow and dreamlike fashion, which led me to do a little reading about Dreaming stories. Dreaming stories pass on important knowledge, cultural values and belief systems to later generations. This particular tale could be seen as an explanation of the time before the white men came and how the people changed and the time after came to be. 
 Part 1 begins like a myth of the coming of the white men: Once upon a time there was a captain on a wide sea, a rough and windswept sea, and his good barque was pitched and tossed something cruel. Later in the book, Bobby Wabalanginy tells the white men who came to his home how they made friends and shared and how more white men came and things changed. He tells them We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we'd lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn't want to hear ours. 
 The protocols for social behavior are also part of Dreaming stories. As things change and the white men increasingly divide the people into "whitefellas" and "blackfellas", Bobby attempts to exert the protocol he knows on his relations with the white people he has known most of his life. He seems to believe he can defend the rights and honor of his people and remain friends with the white men. He soon learns this is impossible, and chooses his people. He suffers for it, but it is his choice and he owns it. 
 This is one of the few books I've read that shows mainly positive interactions between the white settlers and the aboriginal people. Which makes the contrast of the last few chapters all the more stark and distressing. 
 The prose is beautiful, the characters, especially Bobby, are well developed, and it is easy to see how this book was an award winner. 
 When Bobby Wabalanginy told the story, perhaps more than his own lifetime later, nearly all his listeners knew of books and of the language in them. But not, as we do, that you can dive deep into a book and not know just how deep until you return gasping to the surface, and are surprised at yourself, your new and so very sensitive skin. As if you're someone else altogether, some new self trying on the words. 
 Because you need to be inside the sound and the spirit of it, to live here properly. And how can that be, without we people who have been here for all time?