“I’m not prepared to reveal the inner secrets of the Water Board to a member of the general public”, says Police Inspector Truscott, masquerading as an official of the Metropolitan Water Board, in Joe Orton’s 1960s play Loot. By comparison, Tess Lea of the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University has no such reservations. In a robust manner, she attempts to describe and analyse the chaotic bureaucratic environment within the Northern Territory Department of Health and Community Services as it tries to address the almost impossible task of satisfactorily solving significant deficits in Aboriginal health in the NT.

The book is presented as a number of vignettes of the author’s experience in the Department, along with anthropological theory attempting to explain some of the bizarre and incongruent processes that Lea observed. The initial vignette reports on “life in the department” during a rather strange attempt by the previous CLP government to privatise NT hospitals. Another reports the author’s involvement in an almost interminable departmental cross-cultural education program. There is an existential account of a meeting to establish a new store in an Aboriginal community where food lies rotting in the previous store, which was closed possibly as a result of deficient governance processes within the community.

Ultimately, I felt that the book would have been significantly improved if there were comparisons to “superior” bureaucratic processes from another government system, so we could see why the NT bureaucracy was so uniquely ineffective. Nor does the book address the origins of or solutions to the failure of government with Aboriginal people, as has been done comprehensively in the recent book Beyond humbug1 by Michael Dillon and Neil Westbury (which I recommend to readers interested in a more inclusive review of this issue).