For more than a century the savagery of the indigenous tribes of Arnhem Land kept the white man at bay. Explorers passing through the rugged hinterland fired rockets at night to frighten off hostile tribesmen; there were chilling reports of cannibalistic rites. Into this country, at the end of the Second World War, came the young Syd Kyle-Little, patrol officer in the Australian Native Affairs Branch. His first assignment was to stop a tribal war.

Between 1946 and 1950, on foot and by canoe, through crocodile-infested rivers, Kyle-Little made five, long patrols in the Arnhem Land reserve that stretches across the top of northern Australia. He arrived in this hostile land with the white man's law, and soon realised that often the black man's law was better. Kyle-Little's ambition was to preserve indigenous tribal and ceremonial life within the Arnhem Land.

He intended his courageous actions to be incidental to the story, but they cannot be ignored, and when accounts of his thrilling adventures have been forgotten, the memory of Kyle-Little's life will stand as a stirring example of human endeavour.