Towards the middle of the book, for example, Ride asks whether Salvado was ‘transferring his ideals onto real children’. Here, one cannot help but feel that this is, in fact, what Ride is doing. Her prose is weighed down with passive-aggressive assertions that the boys ‘would have seen’, ‘must have thought’, ‘could only have felt’. But there is little evidence to support these assertions, and Ride makes them solely on the basis of conjecture and her imaginative self-identification with the characters. For this reviewer, this is insufficient as history, as well as being unsatisfying as literature.

Similarly, when Ride argues that ‘Salvado had a limited understanding of Conaci and Dirimera’s experiences, as he saw them less as children and more idealised representatives of their race’, one can but wonder at how her own understanding of the children – based on retracing their steps across the globe one-hundred and fifty years after the fact – could really be any better. Ride may or may not claim to be putting herself in the boys’ shoes, but after reading her book, it often seems that she too sees them less as children than and more as representatives of their race – in this case, victims of the Stolen Generations. As a result, Conaci and Dirimera remain the silent, unknown quantity that they are in Salvado’s diaries, little children lost first to history and now, over a century later, to the so-called ‘history wars’.