Idriess met Nemarluk twice and had previously written about him in a section of his 1935 book Man Tracks. Nemarluk died in August 1940 prompting Idriess to write a book focusing on him.
This is the story of Nemarluk, Chief of the Cahn.Mah, King of the Wilds. One of the last of the Stone Age men, he deserved a better fate. I know the wild lands. I knew Nemarluk personally. I hope you will know him when you read of the last three years of his life—and that your sympathy will go out to the aboriginal, the last of God's Stone Age men.
The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that: Mr. Idriess has a good tale to tell—a tale of courage, animal cunning and resource, devotion to a dimly conceived ideal, and death. The confusion wrought in the aboriginal groups by the incredible treachery of the members of the tribe who accept money from the white man for information, and the use of that peculiar sensitiveness that makes the black man such an excellent "tracker", affords material for interesting conjecture. The reader who is quite unversed in aboriginal lore would, too, find much to interest him In the accounts of tribal customs and racial prejudices.