Author: Sue Hall Pyke

The audiobook has snatches of song that take me to Port Fairy Festival in the 1980s. On stage, there, like here, the love story of Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter. Celebrating. I finish, play the song, then the remake, and whitewoman cry.

For those whose hearing is poor, those who do the strenuous work of passing or social absconding, this raw story is manual as much as memoir and critical history. The older story within the personal story makes clear these politics of hearing.

To start with the heart of George Eliot’s squirrel, a good call for those who ‘read novels’ to escape the mind’s ‘unrelenting monologue’ (96). Chapters break. The ‘adverbs or prepositions’, those ‘odd pieces of grammar’ (208). ‘Throughout’ (132). ‘Notwithstanding’ (122). ‘Instead’ (67).

A rare creature, this book. I don’t want to let it go, can’t wait to pass it on to friends, those creatures around me who respect and appreciate the personhood of dogs and who see writing and reading as acts of devotion.

This is not tricky to read when read to you with quiet Irish fury. The male surveillance of the seventies all too familiar even if the troubles are not bombstrewn.  And reading while walking, a crime then, everywhere on the streets now.

Back off, she writes, not backing off. Too well-placed to reveal this well-researched axiom. Settler-Australians seeking Indigenous justice need to take as many steps as are needed to get out of the way. My wordy readerly teacherly efforts reduced to self-privileging gestures.

Country springs to life, listening to Kim Scott read this broken story, healed by stories going way back. His afterword wonders, is it possible to ‘do justice’ to stories ‘abiding in place’? Perhaps. Not only timber comes to life in such pages.

Matriarchal hope glimmers, glorious saucepans saved for, passed down. Smashed by vicious rape. ‘I do not nourish, I do not even turn over, not even when he leaves, this be my death, where I quietly finger the softness of my tongue’ (37).

Flowing prose reveals the frailty in human choices, the systemic flaws that make choices fatal. Like the beleaguered Lizzie, readers may feel they  ‘aren’t touching the ground now, but treading air’ (63). Air cut with the rubble of the past’s hard work.