It’s kind of like watching a scary movie with your hands over your eyes.

You peek through your fingers to see when it is safe to watch again, and in the meantime you see all the grisly stuff anyway.

Reading The Kinchela Boy is a bit like that. At first it’s just a story. But as it dawns on the reader that this is based on things that really happened, and worse, things that really happen, it’s harder to read without flinching.

This is a story from the Stolen Generation. Mick is a half caste, ‘saved’from his family as a seven year old and subjected to unimaginable horrors. The story moves between adult Mick, in prison for murdering the love of his life, and Mick the child, tortured and abused.

Forget the words black, half-caste and Aboriginal. Focus on the word children.

That these unspeakable things happened to children is unforgivable. That adults were the perpetrators of such crimes is unforgivable. That it happened en masse is shameful.

A lawyer who worked in northern NSW, mostly for the NSW Legal Aid Commission and the Aboriginal Legal Service, Christopher Bevan knew he had a story he needed to tell.

“I knew the only way to tell it was to tell one story -Mick Mahoney’s story - for it is only by standing in Mick’s shoes and thinking what he thinks and feeling what he feels that anyone of us, who was not there, who did not endure what these boys endured, can truly come to understand what effect the removal from their families and the daily denial of their true racial origins had on them, on their sense of identity, on their sense of selfworth.”

Mick’s character, and those of his fellow Aboriginal inmates, is written in a pigeon English, at times difficult to decipher, which adds to the poignancy of the story.

Mick the man is worthy of compassion when you understand about Mick the child. It’s the gentleness of the character that makes him so powerful. It’s the hopelessness of his life, the pointlessness of his hopes that makes this story so moving. It’s not a pretty story but it’s one worth reading. It pares the Stolen Generation down to the human component.