The social powerlessness of Aboriginal people has one of its most ghastly expressions in the killing of the young boy Franny, beaten to death in Broome by mindless white thugs who escape being punished by the system of white law. The nature of that response in effect suggests the different ways in which Aboriginal people might define themselves at this moment in history. His is a story of joyous revenge. For Billy, to whom the narrative now returns, the initial response is withdrawal or disengagement - a resigned acceptance of his own helplessness in the face of the seemingly intractable social problems raised by the novel. A reluctant story-teller, he leaves unfinished Fatima's narratives of the personal and historical past to wander, disillusioned and disengaged, to the river.
True Country offers no clear-cut solution to the realities of powerlessness.
What it leaves us with is Billy's vision of the 'true country' which he shares with the unnamed Aboriginal narrator in the final pages of the novel. The nature of this country remains, perhaps deliberately, undefined, imaged in richly poetic terms as a kind of release or re-birth. Perhaps finding the true country suggests a state of being or way of seeing which draws on the past as a source of strength and continues to struggle with the present. Perhaps the very difficulty of definition suggests the novel's lack of faith in political solutions. What this country means, then, is for each reader to decide, by listening respectfully to the stories of others and by weaving our own stories into the making of the nation.