Charters Towers is better known as a Gold town than an Indigenous town. Written True, Not Gammon! A history of Aboriginal Charters Towers fills a gap in the story that is told about a town. This is a book that people of all ages should read to understand Australia's history.
Award winning anthropologist Sally Babidge has collaborated with local elders Val Alberts and Patricia Dallachy to gather oral history and local family photographs. Combining these with archival research, they have produced an accessible account of Charters Towers' hidden Indigenous history. From the Foreword of Written True Not Gammon!: "There is no written history to date that focuses on Aboriginal people in Charters Towers. We wanted to 'get something out there' into the wider community. This book has been written by Sally, and draws on the research she has done for her PhD thesis at James Cook University, but as a couple of the elders said, she has "only written what we told her". Patricia and Valerie guided the project, helped run community meetings, read through and commented on all the drafts, contributed a great many of the photographs for the book, the ideas about how it should look, the kind of things that should be included as well as some of the stories."