When anthropologist Robert Morris arrives at the old Doomadgee Mission, at Bayley Point near Burketown in 1934, he’s intent on learning local languages and customs. One very old woman living there, he discovers, was originally from outback New South Wales, and is something of an outcast amongst the Waanyi and Gangalidda locals.

On delving deeper, Morris discovers that the old woman was the ‘wife’ of a white stockman for more than thirty years in the frontier days, and claims to be the mother of one of the north’s most notorious outlaws. Determined to record the facts of her son’s crimes from her perspective, he sits with her each afternoon.

This is the story she told …