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.
The slaughterhouse work of this book, the ripping apart and the blood and the bones, pain so determinedly unheard, and yet here is the truth of ‘“murrispacetime”. Ears unplug. Cruelty, raw as it ever was. Glorious fleshy black humour: “scissors anchor pistol”.
‘How do I read this? How to read this now? How do you read this?’ (149). Carefully. Skin alert, horsing around, analysand/reader and analyst/reader jamming as ‘lady’ (158). ‘I read it over and over’ (149). ‘Memory is not a stable unit’ (47).
Grateful writing, collective thinking, trauma as a beingness of the body, as patterns of people doing life together. Always self-questioning, tentatively etching the ‘structures of feeling’ (97). Readers also called to be ill-at-ease, opening to the the ‘soul ulcer screaming out’ (70).
Camping out with lyrical honesty is a queer trip and the heart-grab begins from the first. Never a ‘sure way of sourcing the true thing in either the fullness or the voids’ (1). Page after page dog-eared. Not a single false note.
