When the Wet comes to Wyndham, bones wash down with the loose shale of the surrounding Bastion ranges. Year round, lost spirits wander this tiny port town on the northern tip of Western Australia. Some say they belong to the forgotten inmates of an apartheid hospital, built here in 1936 on the foundations of Social Darwinism and eugenics, theories that would reach their horrifying climax in the Holocaust.

The Wanted and the Unwanted is the story of the Wyndham Native Hospital, born from a maelstrom of personal animosities, ambitions and beliefs and from the warring spirits of the early twentieth century. It is the tale of a hospital built three miles from a town that banned Aboriginal people, a place where men, women and children were imprisoned, left untreated and subjected to experimental treatments without their knowledge and against their will. And it is the story of those who resisted and survived to transform Three Mile into a place of hope and a site from which a new Wyndham would emerge.

Details

ISBN13: 9780522882469
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 272
Edition:
Publication Date: 11 Aug 2026
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Publication City, Country: Carlton, Australia
Dimensions (cm): 23.4(H)x15.3(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

A.M. Stafford was a journalist for The Age and The Australian Financial Review and has written for The Good Weekend, Griffith Review, The Tablet, The Sydney Morning Herald and Meanjin. She taught in the UTS Creative Writing school, where she completed a Doctor of Arts. Stafford is now a high school English teacher.

Reviews

'In The Wanted and the Unwanted AM Stafford exposes the unsettling historical truth of an apartheid Kimberley where the brutality of slavery, social Darwinism and eugenics became the foundation of pastoralism - and profound multi-generational white wealth and privilege. With her exhaustive archival research, wry eye and elegant writing, Stafford reveals shocking details of a shameful recent past in Wyndham - replete with all its ghosts and living memories of inhumanity to local Aboriginal people - that carries a profound national resonance for today's Australia.' - Paul Daley, author of Jesustown and The Leap