Tess Lea was born, raised, evacuated, schooled and otherwise taught key life lessons in Darwin. She is an anthropologist whose work both explores why Indigenous social policies so often fail and enacts practical collaborations for doing something about these failurescapes. As her book suggests, she has tough answers for why things fail — answers which suggest a military industrial extractive settler complex still needs to be reckoned with – yet she also understands why Darwin the place gets under your skin.