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4★
“Our hometown was a massacre place. People called it taboo. They said it is haunted and you will get sick if you go there. Others just bragged: we shot you and poisoned the waterholes so you never come back.”
That's the indigenous memory.
This is the white ‘history’.
“Of course it was a long time ago and – here Dan and Malcolm agreed – there was no real evidence of any more than a few Aborigines being killed. Undoubtedly, some were; they both remembered finding a skull wedged by the rock waterho ...more
“Our hometown was a massacre place. People called it taboo. They said it is haunted and you will get sick if you go there. Others just bragged: we shot you and poisoned the waterholes so you never come back.”
That's the indigenous memory.
This is the white ‘history’.
“Of course it was a long time ago and – here Dan and Malcolm agreed – there was no real evidence of any more than a few Aborigines being killed. Undoubtedly, some were; they both remembered finding a skull wedged by the rock waterho ...more
A sad, funny and eventually hopeful story about a group of Noongar people returning to their lands a century or so after a massacre. Scott is preoccupied with language and particularly with efforts to revive the Noongar language - the cultural connections forged by language and practices help to heal a community deeply damaged by colonisation and its after-effects (especially drugs and alcohol). The writing style took a while to work its way into my brain, but once I devoted some decent chunks o
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I feel quite affected by this. Leaves you with a glow at the end like many a great novel does but there is so much more to it. It's a novel that should be disseminated far and wide. I'm surprised it didn't win the Miles Franklin Prize in 2018 even though it did win a number of other prizes. Looking forward to going back and reading Kim Scott's other novels that have been difficult to start in the past. He is a master at his craft.
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Aug 11, 2017
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