I am partial to a verse novel (although I have only read a handful), so I was keen to read Ali Cobby Eckermann’s She is the Earth, which was longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize.
The book is a luminous love letter to Mother Nature, including her life-sustaining ecosystems, weather patterns and landscapes.
In many ways, it reminded me of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, but instead of looking at Earth from above, it looks at Earth from the ground up and presents it as a living, breathing organism.
I am staring
at the new day
it grows brighter
and brighter
the sky and the sea
defined by blue
as if breathing now
the water is tidal
inhaling first
exhaling next
the horizon
a definition
(page 59)
This long-form poem is comprised of meditative, two-line stanzas. It’s minimalistic yet brims with rich imagery and pulses with life.
Repeated motifs — of birth, of breath, of “sun and moon and sky”, for instance — abound, creating gentle echoes that deepen the reader’s understanding of the work as you progress through it.
And just like birth, it begins with a sense of violence…
exhausted I am
unable to breathe
I scratch for air
my mouth a cave
(page 5)
But moves towards a more gentle way of being:
from the cosmos
I learn my place
(page 80)
That “learning my place” is a central theme. References to other life forms, such as birds — brolgas, pelicans, owls, for instance — reveal how everything in the natural world has a role to play — and a path to follow.
do not diminish
the role of the mother
do not diminish
the role of the father
do not diminish
the role of the child
do not diminish
the role of the ant
(page 81)
The author, a Yankunytjatjara woman from South Australia, has long struggled to find her place in the world.
She was forcibly removed from her family as one of the Stolen Generations, which caused long-lasting trauma, powerfully evoked in her extraordinary memoir, Too Afraid to Cry (2012). In 2017 she was the first Indigenous person anywhere in the world to win the international Windham-Campbell Prize.
She is the Earth is unlike any other book in Australian literature. Of the works Eckermann has written to date, it could well prove her most enduring.
I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. To see all the books reviewed for this project, please visit my Reading First Nations Writers page.
In Australia, state-sponsored programs forcibly removed generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities in what we now call the Stolen Generations.
This shameful separation of children severed significant cultural, spiritual and familial bonds, and caused long-lasting intergenerational trauma, which First Nations people are still dealing with today.
I was reminded of this when I read Amanda Peters’ debut novel The Berry Pickers. Even though the book is Canadian, it explores what happens when Indigenous families are torn apart and disconnected from their culture.
Missing girl
The story begins in 1962 and is framed around a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia who cross the border and decamp to Maine every summer to pick blueberries for the season.
One hot day, four-year-old Ruthie, the youngest child of five, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, was the last person to see her. He left her sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields while he went off to skip stones on a nearby lake, but when he returned, his beloved sister was nowhere to be seen.
A frantic search yields no clue as to where she might have gone. The police, when informed, are disinterested, telling Ruthie’s distraught parents: “If you were so concerned about the girl, you’d have taken better notice.”
Ruthie is never found. Instead, she’s raised by a privileged white family as one of their own under a new name — “Norma” — and knows nothing of her earlier life.
Two perspectives
The book is divided into two separate narrative threads, told in alternate chapters from Joe’s and Norma’s points of view.
Joe’s storyline is told retrospectively, as he looks back on the formative experiences of his life: the loss of his sister; the brutal bashing of his older brother, who dies from his wounds; a serious accident that leaves him disabled; and the love of a good wife, whom he eventually commits an unforgivable act of violence on.
For much of his adult life, he has drifted from place to place and cut himself off from everyone he knows, including his daughter, and is beset by all-consuming rage and grief and guilt. He’s now dying of cancer and is being cared for by his two elder siblings, Mae and Ben, with whom he’s recently been reunited.
Norma’s storyline is told in chronological order as she grapples with an overbearing, overprotective mother and an emotionally distant father. She’s a bright child, with an enquiring mind, but something isn’t quite right.
In the early days, she’s plagued by “dreams” of another mother and a sibling — which are clearly, unbeknownst to her, memories of her Mi’kmaq family — and as she gets older she’s puzzled as to why her skin is darker than her parents. This anomaly is spirited away with explanations that she’s a “throwback” to her Italian grandfather. But even when she grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher and gets married, there’s always a niggling feeling in the back of her mind that her past doesn’t add up.
Poignant tale
Right from the start, it’s obvious these two storylines are going to converge in some way, so this isn’t a novel that offers up a mystery in need of being solved (although exactly how Ruthie came to live with her white family **is** intriguing). Instead, the author is focused on showing us two sides of the one coin: what happens to the family left behind when a beloved child goes missing, and what happens to the missing child if they are raised with no knowledge of their biological family?
By adopting this approach, Peters, who is of Mi’kmaq heritage, is able to explore the repercussions on a First Nations family when the police fail to treat the disappearance of an Indigenous child with the seriousness it deserves, and she’s also able to show how a young person’s identity is impacted when they are uprooted from their culture.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s well-plotted, fast-paced and suspenseful. The characters are wonderfully realised (Norma’s Aunt June is a standout) and the individual voices of the two protagonists are distinct so there’s never any doubt whose perspective is being told. Peters also writes beautiful descriptions of landscapes, people and places.
This is a poignant and heartfelt story about racism, grief, guilt, betrayal, hope, curiosity, love — and the pull of family.
I read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which focuses on literature by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but may occasionally include First Nations writers from other parts of the world. In this instance, the First Nations writer is from Nova Scotia, Canada. Amanda Peters is of mixed European and Mi’kmaq heritage and belongs to the Glooscap First Nation.
Stan Grant’s latest book, The Queen is Dead, blends lived experience with factual journalism and memoir to tell a compelling story about Australia’s colonisation under Empire.
It asks important questions about the monarchy and why Australia so willingly accepted (and promoted) the seamless transition of King Charles III reign without properly considering the perspective of First Nations people, both at home and abroad, of this news.
I began reading it just days before Grant, a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, announced he was stepping back from his role presenting the panel discussion show Q&A on ABC TV because of the racism he’d experienced following the King’s coronation.
Toxic racism
That racism, mainly via social media, came as a direct result of his contribution to the TV coverage of the coronation in which he discussed the Crown’s legacy — massacres and segregation of his people, invasion and theft of their land. Taken out of context, his commentary (or “truth-telling” as I call it) was viewed as being unsuitable for the occasion in the same way as saying horrible things about someone at their funeral would not be wholly appropriate.
The ABC failed to come to his defence even though it had invited him on the show to talk about this specific issue (italics are mine), and so he was left to deal with the toxic social media comments, or “racial filth” as he describes it, alone. But Grant claims he was speaking “truth with love”. (You can read his statement, published on the ABC website, here.)
Knowing this background lends The Queen is Dead a particular potency. It exposes the awful truth of the monarchy’s impact on First Nations people, not just here in Australia but around the world, and highlights the disconnect between the Crown, represented by Queen Elizabeth II, and the legacy of impoverishment and imprisonment experienced by Indigenous Australians created in its name andwhich she never acknowledged in her lifetime (italics are mine).
Death of a monarch
Grant begins his book with Queen Elizabeth II’s death after her 70-year reign, but this is not really a story about the Queen per se. Yes, it’s about what the Crown represents, especially under Empire, and yes, it argues that there’s no place for it in a modern forward-thinking world.
But the crux of The Queen is Dead is less about monarchy and more about Whiteness (it is capitalised in the book) and the West, both of which are social constructs and can, therefore, be changed (as Grant’s logic suggests).
Some of his arguments are confronting, especially if you are White, a royalist, British or a combination thereof, and the anger is palpable, but in laying bare the truth, he shows us a path to reconciliation. He argues that the Queen’s death — she is described as “the last White Queen” throughout — offers a chance to reset, end the monarchy in Australia and redress the bitter legacy of colonialism for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
What is Whiteness?
Here’s how he describes Whiteness, which he claims is an invention of the British:
In her land [the Queen’s], under the rule of her ancestors, Whiteness was born. No, invented. Because Whiteness is an invention. It was created to crush other people. Whiteness made the world, a world dominated by force, and then it made its domination legal. It wrote laws that underwrote the theft of other people’s land, It wrote laws that put chains around the necks of Black people and put them to work to make untold riches for White people. The great destructive power of Whiteness was to decide who was White. It divided up the world and placed Whiteness at the top.
Later, he adds that Whiteness is not White people:
It is an organising principle. It is a way of ordering the world. It is an invention. An idea. A curse.
Grant asks whether it is possible to be ever truly post-racial, suggesting that even those White people who are allies aren’t fully aware of their own unconscious bias. When reporters, for instance, claim it is the colour of someone’s skin that got them killed by a terrorist, Grant says that logic is wrong:
There is nothing in the colour of their skin that should mean they are gunned down in broad daylight. Their skin has nothing to do with it. They were killed because of what the crazed White man with a gun believed about Black skin.
Later, he argues that White people are “tempted by amnesia” and he is often asked why he simply can’t move on when he mentions the negative legacy of the Queen’s rule.
I know why forgetting is so prized. Because the past is too ugly to look upon. While ever there is the past, there can be no peace.
Angry and profound
The book is heavy going, not in its prose style, which is clear and concise and often elegant, but in the heft of its ideas and the weight of its anger. And yet, I found it utterly compelling and read it in two sittings. But afterwards, in the wake of what I’d just read, I had to let it sit with me, I had to process and digest it before I was comfortable enough to write about it. (How long did that take? The answer: six weeks.)
I feel angry on Grant’s behalf. I see images of the royals now and I feel a deep loathing for them in a way I never loathed them before (don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a fan but I kind of tolerated them as figures of fascination).
I can’t understand the Australian media’s obsession with them and the almost near sycophancy of the coronation and everything Charles has done since his mother’s death. The pomp and ceremony of the recent Trooping the Colour, for instance, just looked like an anachronistic throwback, completely inappropriate and utterly frivolous at a time of world crisis. I can’t even begin to imagine what my First Nations colleagues at work think — and dare not ask.
The Queen is Dead is subtitled “The Time has come for a Reckoning”. My hope is that Australians will rally behind this idea when the Voice Referendum is held later this year. The eyes of the world will be watching.
I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page.
Debra Dank’s We Come with This Place is a love letter to Country and family.
A brilliantly evocative memoir about place and culture, it explores Australia’s dark history and the special connection First Nations people have with Country — that is, the lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected.
It takes us on a wondrous adventure out bush, but it also shows us the terrible injustices inflicted on First Nations people and the violence that underpins Australian history. And yet, this is not a misery memoir. It’s hopeful, even joyous in places, and it brims with an intense love for Aboriginal culture and traditions.
Our story is etched into the rocks and it whispers through the trees and with our kin who are more than human. The wind tells it, sometimes strolling gently, sometimes bellowing from cavernous, dark, felt places, where eyes do not see, and only our goodalu can feel.
Warm and generous
Based on Dank’s PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics, We Come with This Place is written in a spirit of generosity and is warm-hearted, tender and humorous.
It mixes autobiography with intergenerational family history and First Nations storytelling. (The dreaming tale of three water-women “who came out of the salt water to the north-east of Gudanji Country” is a recurring refrain.)
It gives us a glimpse of another way of life, one in which relationships — with plants, animals, landscapes and ancestors — are crucial and grounded in reciprocity. And where family ties and kinship are key.
As a child I sat with my two sisters and our mum and dad at the fire, watching the gidgea logs burn to coals that could cook a nice, charred edge on a goanna. This night, though, it would be chunks of the recently killed bullock charring on gidgea. The gidgea burned and its dry heat worked its way under our skin and smoothed the dryness already there from the sun, becoming an extra layer of warmth. There was often a chill in the air at night in this place. We sat in company with our old stories, living our new stories and speaking our place into them where they came together. Our dad didn’t often waste air with words, he practised a silence that let other stories be told, so as we sat with the gidgea, we learned to hear and feel those stories waiting in the gaps between the noise.
The narrative is not told in chronological order; instead, it comprises a mix of vignettes, stories and anecdotes which move back and forth in time and cover Dank’s upbringing on remote Queensland cattle stations, her parent’s troubled but loving marriage, her own marriage (to a white man) and the ways in which her grandparents guided her and passed on traditional knowledge and how she, herself, is doing the same with her own grandchildren.
Her father’s story
Much of the memoir focuses on her father, Soda, with whom she has a close but complex relationship. She details his brilliant skills as a horseman and station hand (he could fix anything despite never being trained) and his deep knowledge of Country.
But she also reveals how the trauma of racist violence runs deep. The hardships and horrendous experiences he endured throughout his life (he witnessed, for instance, the brutal rape of his mother by station men when she stood up for herself and refused to return to her place of work), using this as a prism through which to view so many injustices experienced by First Nations people.
As a memoir about resilience, identity and family, We Come with This Place — which has been shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize — is heartfelt and honest. It should be required reading for all Australians. I adored it.
Debra Dank is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman who has almost 40 years of experience as an educator. She has worked in schools and universities across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and the Northern Territory.
This is my third book for the 2023 Stella Prize. I am trying to read as many as I can from the shortlist before the winner is named on 27 April 2023. I also read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. All the books reviewed for this project are on my dedicated First Nations Writers page.
Cartwarra is a Nyoongar word that roughly translates to “silly” or “crazy”.
In the Foreword to Alf Taylor’s book, Cartwarra or what?, the academic Anne Brewster writes: “You’ll understand the power and reach of the word by the time you finish the book.” She’s right.
This is a truly remarkable and engaging collection of poems and short stories from a widely respected and prolific First Nations writer. Despite some of the heavy themes — alcoholism, poverty and prejudice, for instance — that underpin his work, Taylor writes with a sense of mischief: humour and wry wit are never too far away.
Dry humour
Take the short story “Charlie” in which a 60-year-old man is arrested for being drunk and disorderly in the WA gold mining town of Kalgoorlie. He’s thrown into jail for the night and then released without charge, the sergeant warning him that he shouldn’t pick a fight with Paddy Hannan and think he can get away with it. Paddy, it turns out, is a statue! (This one here, in fact, of Irishman Patrick “Paddy” Hannan.)
Many characters in his other short stories enjoy ribbing one another — or taking the piss, as we might say, cadging money from whoever’s lucky enough to have a few dollars and chasing others for a charge (drink). Indeed, his ear for dialogue and (sometimes crude) vernacular is spot on, bringing conversations alive and making them crackle with repartee and wit.
This humour shines through in some of his poems, too. “Nyoongar Woman and a Mobile Phone” is an example:
No more reading smoke signals
pick up mobile phone and talk —
to who? She might say
the Kimberleys, the Wongis, Yamitjis, Nyoongars,
or to any blackfella’s
got my number;
she scratches her head
in eager anticipation:
Huh, huh,
‘nother ‘lation on the line
‘Yes, my dear. Oh hello’
‘How are you?’
‘What!’
‘You want twenty dollars?’
‘But I got fuck-all!
You got your money today.’
‘Why me?’
‘Um not a big shot
Nyoongar yorgah
’cause I work for A.L.S. [Aboriginal Legal Service]’
‘No, I got nothing!’
‘Um wintjarren like you.’
‘Yeah and fuck you too!’
Sombre stories
But the flipside to the laughter isn’t far away. In the opening story, “Wildflowers”, Taylor gives voice to the pain and fear of a mother whose daughter is stolen by policemen on horseback while out picking wildflowers:
It all happened within a split second of fierce movement. But to Ada it would come to seem a slow-motion replay in her mind. Ada had just barely touched the flowers when her daughter was snatched from the ground, and the troopers held her tightly. Queenie screamed and screamed for her mother. As the troopers rode off with the screaming child, the dust lingered high in the late morning. All Ada could see were the beautiful petals falling aimlessly to the ground, amidst the red dust.
Taylor is, himself, a member of the Stolen Generations and was raised in New Norcia Mission, Western Australia. As the blurb on the back of this edition states, his work “exposes uncomfortable truths in the lives of his Aboriginal characters”.
In Cartwarra or what? we meet an underclass of Aboriginal people, many cut off from Country and culture, struggling to get by. But Taylor also highlights the strong bonds between Aboriginal Australians, their tight-knit family and kinship groups, their love, care and kindness towards one another, and their enduring resourcefulness and resilience.
I much enjoyed spending time in their company.
I read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. It’s also a contender for my #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters. You can find out more about this reading project, along with a list of Western Australian books already reviewed on the site, here.
Please note, Cartwarra or what? is only available as an eBook outside of Australia. If you would prefer a paperback edition, you can order it from the independent bookstore Readings.com.au. Shipping info here.
Julie Janson’s Benevolence tells the story of the early days of European settlement in Australia but with one important twist: it’s told through the eyes of a young Aboriginal girl.
Written as a rebuttal to Kate Grenville’s The Secret River*, a novel that dared to talk about frontier violence from a white perspective, Janson uses a First Nations lens to tell the other side of the story.
The author, who is a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Nation, says it is a work of fiction but is based on historical events in and around the Hawkesbury River in Western Sydney.
In her afterword, she says:
The characters are derived from Darug, Gundungurra and Wonnaruah Aboriginal people who defended their lands, culture and society. Muraging is based on my great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Thomas, who was a servant on colonial estates in the Hawkesbury area. The other characters in the novel are inspired by historical figures and my imagination, except the governors who are based on historical documents.
Raised by white settlers
Benevolence spans 26 years (1816 to 1846) in the life of Muraging (later renamed Mary), who finds herself caught between two cultures.
Raised and educated by white settlers at a boarding school set up for Aboriginal children, she desperately misses her family and for most of this novel, she swings between the two: working as a servant when she needs food and shelter, heading on country to be with her people when she needs to get back in touch with her culture and traditions.
But even when she is with her own kind she stands out, for she wears European, albeit servant, clothes, can play the violin (she totes one around with her) and speaks English. In white society, the colour of her skin marks her out as different and her pretty looks attract the unwanted attention of often violent men. No matter where she is, she is “othered” and her desire to fit in is only made harder by the children she bears (with white men) and must raise on her own.
Frontier wars
But this is not just a tale about one indigenous woman’s experience, it’s a larger tale about the frontier wars, which rage on in the background, and of the violence committed on First Nations people by white settlers determined to keep the land for themselves, declaring Australia terra nullius and treating the original inhabitants as nothing more than vermin to be shot and exterminated.
From the start, Mary is aware of the danger that white men pose to her race because she has heard the rumours circulate at school:
Days go by and Mary hears other children’s stories whispered in the night. Many have seen, and still see, the bodies of their parents shot and hung on trees with corn cobs in their mouths. They still watch in horror as crows peck out living eyes and black beaks pick brains.
Later, as an adult, she knows about the Bells Falls Gorge massacre, north of Bathurst, in which women and children jumped to their deaths after white settlers opened fire on them — and she is terrified she could be caught up in something similar.
She’s also increasingly aware of the destruction white people are causing and the implications this poses for local tribes. When she’s on country, for instance, the women in her tribe struggle to gather enough food to eat because “the white hunters have massacred all the local kangaroos” and there is little game nearby. The new settlers are also wreaking havoc in other ways:
The men discuss the thousands of newcomers arriving in ships in Sydney Town and how they crash through the bush smashing the fragile undergrowth, cutting down the oldest, tallest and most sacred trees – even carved burial trees. Log-splitting men follow the axe men and the sound is deafening, night and day. Fiery pits burn all night with wasted bark. Her peoples’ footpaths have become bullock tracks with deep greasy mud churned by huge wagons full of logs. The tiny fruits and flowers are being crushed. Nothing is left of the forest’s ceremonial sites. Their stories cannot be told if the places and sites of the ancestors are gone. The waterholes are ruined by cattle and the goona-filled water cannot be drunk.
Throughout the story, we see how Mary’s Christian upbringing — supposedly designed to deliver her from sin — simply entraps her. It’s a feeling that never quite goes away, messes with her sense of identity and makes her reliant on white settlers who don’t always have her best interests at heart.
An important novel
Benevolence is an important book because it puts a human face to an Aboriginal perspective, a perspective that has previously been ignored or written out of history.
At times, I felt it lost momentum, perhaps because it is just so detailed, covering every aspect of Mary’s life, which includes time on the run in the bush, various jobs as a servant, a lusty romance with a white reverend and a short stint in jail. But on the whole, it’s a comprehensive account of all the many challenges and tragedies to which Mary must bear witness.
* The Secret River is based on Grenville’s ancestor Soloman Wiseman, a Thames waterman who was transported to Australia for theft, and who later settled on the Hawkesbury River at the area now known as Wisemans Ferry. He is mentioned in Benevolence as follows:
Wiseman’s Ferry is a large raft where loads of flour are winched across the river by a metal wheel driven by a horse. The old ferryman and innkeeper is Solomon Wiseman. His inn is called The Sign of the Packet; he is an ex-convict and lighterman from the Thames in London. Along the riverbank, the convict road workers are dressed in torn, dirty shirts, their skins tanned from the sun and hunger etched on their faces.
This is my 7th book for #20booksofsummer 2022 edition. I bought it in July 2020, began reading it and then got distracted by covid lockdown shenanigans and never returned to it. I also read it this year as part of my project to read more books by First Nations writers. You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page.
Dr Anita Heiss’ Am I Black Enough for You? should be required reading for every Australian.
First published in 2012, it has been updated and subtitled “10 Years On”. I haven’t read the original (which has been eloquently reviewed by Lisa at ANZLitLovers), so I’m not sure how much it diverts from the first, but I found it an entertaining and educational read and it made me rethink and reassess my own views on what it means to be an Aboriginal in this country.
It’s billed as a memoir but it’s much more than that. It’s an account of a range of issues affecting Aboriginal Australians as told through Heiss’ own intimate and personal lens as a successful author, a passionate advocate for Aboriginal literacy and a high-achieving public intellectual. Just last month, she was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to tertiary Indigenous Studies & the Arts.
Rejecting the stereotypes
A proud Wiradyuri woman from central NSW, Heiss was raised in suburban Sydney and educated at her local Catholic school. Her father was an immigrant from Austria and her mother was Aboriginal and she cheekily describes herself as a “concrete Koori with Westfield Dreaming” because she lives in the city and loves shopping!
This is my story: it is a story about not being from the desert, not learning to speak my traditional language until I was fifty years old, and not wearing ochre. I’m not very good at playing the clap sticks, either, and I loathe sleeping outdoors. Rather, my story is of the journey of being a proud sovereign Wiradyuri yinaa, just not necessarily being the Blackfella — the so-called ‘real Aborigine’ — some people, perhaps even you, expect me to be.
The book essentially breaks down the stereotypes and myths surrounding what it is to be a First Nations person in Australia. It also shatters the expectation that just because Heiss identifies as an Aboriginal, she does not have to be “all-knowing of Aboriginal culture, or to be the Black Oracle”.
I’m Aboriginal. I’m just not the Aboriginal person a lot of people want or expect me to be.
It’s written in a friendly, light-hearted tone but Heiss isn’t afraid to tackle serious issues head-on. She writes about the Stolen Generations (her grandmother was removed from her family in 1910 and lived a life of servitude until 1927, when she got married), racism, why she doesn’t celebrate Australia Day, the black lives matter movement and poor literacy rates in remote Aboriginal communities.
Writing about writing
But she really hits her stride when talking about literacy, which is a clear and demonstrable passion, and there is an excellent chapter (“Writing us into Australian history”) about the importance of including Aboriginal voices, perspectives and characters in books. A successful and award-winning author in her own right (she has seven novels to her name, as well as a handful of children’s books), Heiss believes her work has a role to play in “placing Aboriginal people on the overall Australian national identity radar”:
With all my books I receive feedback, written and in person, from mobs around the country who tell me that they have had the same experience of discrimination or racism, or that they were moved by a story or poem. I also have a lot of non-Indigenous people (the largest part of my audience because of population size), who tell me that they have been challenged by what I have written and have learned from the experience of reading my work.
Interestingly, since the original edition of this book, there has been an explosion in First Nations writers being published in Australia, and Heiss is particularly proud that the BlackWords database she helped establish now has more than 7,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors and storytellers listed on it.
There’s an excellent chapter near the end (“20 reasons you should read Blak”) — adapted from the keynote address she gave at the inaugural Blak & Bright festival at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in 2016 — which outlines why we should all be reading First Nations writers. (As if I need any excuse.)
But it’s really the last chapter (“The Trial”), about her successful racial discrimination class action case against News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt (you can read her take on it in this piece published on Crikey), which acts as a resounding “take that!” to anyone who thinks they can say what they like about Aboriginal Australians and get away with it. Not only does it highlight the values by which Heiss lives — to call people out who perpetuate harmful racial stereotypes and to ensure the world she leaves behind is more equitable and compassionate than it is today — but it also makes Am I Black Enough for You? 10 Years On such an excellent and important read.
This subscription service ties in nicely with my own project to read more books by First Nations writers, which you can read more abouthere. You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page.
And finally, this is my contribution to Lisa’s First Nations Reading Week (July 3-10, 2022), which coincides with NAIDOC Week, an annual event to celebrate and recognise the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Mudrooroo was the pen name of Colin Thomas Johnson (1938-2019), a novelist, poet, essayist and playwright. He was once described as “the voice of Indigenous Australia” because his writing mainly focused on Aboriginal issues and featured Australian Aboriginal characters.
Wild Cat Falling, first published in 1965, was his debut novel. According to the publisher, it was held up as “the first novel by any writer of Aboriginal blood to be published in Australia”.
He traced his ancestry to the Noongar^ nation of Western Australia, but in 1996 Noongar elders rejected his claim.
Despite this controversy over his Aboriginality (of which you can read more on his Wikipedia page), I still wanted to read this novel as part of my project to read more books by First Nations Writers. From what I can gather, he was brought up as Aboriginal, thought of himself as Black and writes from personal experience.
What made this book unique at the time was the fact that it highlights how the Australian judicial system, and the wider community, was prejudiced against Aboriginal Australians, a systematic problem that still exists more than half a century later.
But all that aside, Wild Cat Falling plays an important role in the Australian literary canon because it’s a brilliant book in its own right. It’s stylish, compelling and memorable. And I ate it up in about two sittings.
Release from jail
First edition
A gripping first-person account of a young Aboriginal man’s life, Wild Cat Falling is narrated by a nameless youth who describes himself as a “bodgie” ^^. He is about to be released from Fremantle Prison where he’s been incarcerated for the past 18 months for petty criminality.
Today the end and the gates will swing to eject me, alone and so-called free. Another debt paid to society and I never owed it a thing.
His voice, intimate and forthright, is tinged with anger, the arrogance of youth and a melancholy sense of futility, that this is his lot in life and there’s no use hoping for anything better. Jail has been a refuge for him, a place where he’s been safe and accepted by others, had a decent roof over his head and three meals a day.
The story, which is split into three parts, charts what happens to him after he walks free, as he tries to adjust to life back in society as a “half-breed delinquent”.
It’s a tale of an emotionally detached man — “I trained myself this way so no phoney emotion can touch me” — who is desperate, perhaps unconsciously, to connect with others and to defy expectation.
But on his first day of freedom , there’s really only one thing on his mind, and that is sex.
An encounter on the beach
When he meets an attractive young woman, a psychology student, on the beach, he strikes up a conversation with her, explaining how his education, first at an ordinary school, then a boy’s home, followed by the Noongar camps and latterly jail, has been unconventional. And he makes no bones about the fact he has no real plans now he’s free beyond getting drunk and sleeping with women until his prison pay runs out because he’ll be put in jail soon enough even if he doesn’t do anything wrong.
The woman, June, is perplexed.
“You haven’t got a clue,” I tell her. “They make the law so chaps like me can’t help breaking it whatever we do, and the likes of you can hardly break it if you try.”
“How do you mean?” she asks.
“For one thing. We make the only friends we have in jail, but if we’re seen talking outside we’re arrested for consorting with crims.”
When she later accuses him of being lazy, of bludging on the taxpayer, he feels the “old bitter taste of resentment in my mouth”.
Nothing ever up to them. Only up to us, the outcast relics in the outskirt camps. The lazy, ungrateful rubbish people, who refuse to cooperate or integrate or even play it up for the tourist trade. Flyblown descendants of the dispossessed erupting their hopelessness in petty crime. I glare at her with concentrated hate. I want to wither her glib white arrogance with biting scorn, but I can’t find the words.
A friendly invite
Perhaps because she’s interested enough to get to know him a bit better, June throws down the gauntlet and suggests he meet her and her friends at the coffee lounge at her university the next evening, which he does. The encounter is enlightening — for it’s clear he’s there as a kind of social experiment, giving a group of white students a chance to speak to an Aboriginal for the first time. He plays up to it a bit, but his inner resentment is writ large on the page.
Maybe she thinks if she keeps it up [her racism masquerading as white empathy] I will leap out and do a corroboree in the middle of the floor.
Sick of the group’s condescension, he has a bit of fun with them by offering his bulldust opinion about a painting hanging on the wall — “a revolting mess of hectic semi-circles and triangles” — that seems to impress them. He holds his own talking about art and jazz, winning further admiration and a rare invite to an evening house party.
The narrative continues to unfurl in this kind of spontaneous manner as he goes about his business, sleeps with a couple of women, is reacquainted with his mother, hangs out with the university mob and reconnects with his former bodgie mob. But there’s trouble brewing because he’s finding it hard to suppress the memories from his troubled past that keep coming back to haunt him.
When he decides to steal a car and go on a road trip, a new, dangerous edginess creeps into the storyline — and any chance of redemption seems remote.
Dramatic ending
Wild Cat Falling is a powerful tale, of a Black man on the margins, someone who is indifferent to the two worlds in which he must navigate, a lost soul who doesn’t understand himself much less the culture and country that’s been denied him.
It has a dramatic climax, one that involves a policeman and a pair of handcuffs, which suggests the story is going to end exactly where it began — in prison.
^ Also spelt Noongah, Nyungar, Nyoongar, Nyoongah, Nyungah, Nyugah and Yunga.
^^ An informal Australian term for a teenage subculture from the 1950s, depicted as loutish and rebellious. See this Wikipedia entry for more detail.
I read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. It’s also a contender for my #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters. You can find out more about this reading project, along with a list of Western Australian books already reviewed on the site, here.
Please note, Wild Cat Falling is only available in Australia. International readers can order it from independent bookstore Readings.com.au. Shipping info here.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I need a new reading project that will help shape my reading year.
For the past six years, I’ve used the Australian Women Writers Challenge to help do this, but the challenge, as we know it, has now ceased. It’s going off in a new direction, celebrating older, less well-known women writers in an attempt to rescue them from history’s big black hole, a noble idea and one that I will be following closely. But sadly, the participatory element — of adding your reviews to an online database — has gone.
I figured that I might just spend all of 2022 reading on a whim. I participated in so many reading challenges and reading weeks hosted on other blogs during the course of last year that following my own agenda this year seemed quite tempting. But my reading in January was a bit directionless and I realised I don’t want to continue along those lines.
I want a new project, one that I can spread out over the course of a year, that will challenge me to read outside of my comfort zone, introduce me to new voices and perspectives, as well as provide some entertainment and escapism as well as education and enlightenment. (I don’t want much, do I? 😂)
The recent ABC TV series Books That Made Us highlighted how indigenous Australian writers are going through a boom right now. And while I was chuffed to discover that I had read most of the novels name-checked, the show also introduced me to some new names and book titles I was keen to explore. Given I have several books by Aboriginal Australians in my TBR already, it seemed logical to create a project that would encourage me to tackle them.
And so, I give you my Reading First Nations Writers project.
Between now and the end of December, I’d like to read and review at least 12 books by First Nations writers. I’m going to rely heavily on my local library, which has a dedicated indigenous section, but I’m also keen to read books I already have on my shelves, including Benevolence by Julie Janson, Carpentaria and The Swan Book, both by Alexis Wright, Billa Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss and The Old Lie by Claire G. Coleman.
I’d be delighted if you wanted to join along. You don’t have to read books by indigenous Australians — First Nations is a broad term to include indigenous peoples from around the world (although it mainly applies to Australia and Canada as per this Wkipedia entry). Feel free to use my logo above and link back here or send a trackback so I know you’ve participated.
I will build a page, similar to my #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters, so I can track my progress because even though I will be #ReadingFirstNationsWriters in 2022, I expect this will be a long-term project stretching into the years ahead. I’m really looking forward to it.
UPDATE (13 FEB):You will now find a dedicated page under ‘projects’ on the main menu bar of this blog. Or simply click here.
I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. To see all the books reviewed for this project, please visit my Reading First Nations Writers page. 
Reading Matters 