Inga SimpsonSimpson uses a disjunctive first-person/third-person narrative to move back and forth between the childhood and adult passages. These flashes backwards and forwards appear arbitrary. They tend to jolt the reader from the mesmerised reverie in which well-written novels hold us and into a state akin to being driven in a sedan that keeps hopping out of gear. In addition, she chooses to thread her story with a sporting trope, a trick she used in Mr Wigg. In that case it was cricket; this time it is bicycle racing. For readers who are not enthralled by the Tour de France, this recurring motif annoys rather than enlivens.

The central story concerns the children's discovery of indigenous sacred objects on Jayne's family property. They vow to keep them secret, but the adults have always known about them, and, for political reasons too briefly alluded to, the fathers form a cabal and destroy them. We flash forward to the adult Jayne and the theft of an Aboriginal artefact from the museum in which she works. Jayne is embroiled in the theft – and the childish secret transmutes into the adult's ethical dilemma over the rights and wrongs of repatriation of Aboriginal objects of significant cultural value.

But is reparative aesthetics really the book's animating idea? It is as if the carcass of this novel hangs like a cooling beast in a meat house, creaking intermittently in a slight breeze while flies buzz busily outside.

It is not until page 153 that Jayne's lover, Sarah, says 'You aren't responsible for the past.' 'But I am,' she said. 'Sometimes, someone has to do something.' It is this idea of guilt, assuaged through resuscitative action on behalf of indigenous people who remain strangely mute and without agency that fulfils the author's true intentions, the inference being that they are incapable of saving themselves. This is heavy material for an otherwise romantic novel: post-colonial responsibility for theft, not only of art, but also by inference of land, language, and identity.

If guilt is Simpson's thesis, why does she skirt around the edges? Strangely, Jayne's guilt remains passionless, disconnected, existential. She paints her verandah boards, pretends she is competing in the Tour de France, and worries about her career and her love life. The novel's focus rarely shifts from Jayne's self-referential settler perspective. A subtle elision has occurred, a rubbing out. Once again, someone else tells the First Peoples' story, but it is not really about them. And there is no depth to this purloined tale, no exhumation of how events reconfigured the world the characters live in. Jayne carries on a monologue about what she experiences, but what is missing is a meditation on what this might mean. Her musings never inform her life; that leap from exposition into reflection does not happen.

The one exception to this narrow focus is the character of Ian, whom we learn is indigenous. But he too is erased. As the teenage Jayne muses, 'Despite doing every history unit available, despite all we were learning, there was nothing about the people who had been here before us, or those who were here still – Ian, right here in our own classroom. He was one of us, always had been.'

Weaving a bloodless tale around the ongoing dispossession of a people is a risky business. We must choose our words carefully lest we succumb to the pitfalls of entitlement and privilege and become yet again the voice that overlays, displaces, and drowns out the indigenous one.

Megan Davis, an indigenous professor of public and international law and expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues, in her essay in Griffith Review 51, 'Listening But Not Hearing', remarks on the overwhelming indigenous rejection of the campaign for constitutional recognition, 'and the growing resistance to being "recognised" by the settler state'. 'The subjects of recognition,' she notes, 'are all but erased from the process.'

Davis suggests the indigenous task must be to find an internal reliance and a communal strength. 'In the meantime,' she says 'you can continue on without us, as you always have.'

In a country where remote parts of Australia increasingly resemble a failed state, can any non-indigenous writer fail to see how dangerous it is to keep on enacting that unconscious dismissive indifference, in word and repetitive deed, through our sentimental attachment to the idea of exculpation?