“We gave up on that Payback stuff a long time ago, because we always knew that death is only one part of a story that is forever beginning …”

 Looking southwest from Cape Raoul, Tasman National Park. May 2021.

Taboo by Kim Scott

Kim Scott has achieved a great feat with Taboo. In tackling a subject so replete with immense themes - decolonisation, pain, the art of memory and forgetting - he manages to toe the line successfully like few others. Moreover, he's written an authentic and engaging book on the murder, dispossession and maltreatment of the Noongar people that is at once sombre yet optimistic.

This is all the more startling from a book saturated with violence of all kinds. Violence upon violence over generations to the point where our heroes are both sullied by that violence - both perpetrators and victims - and retain the redemptive power that will be required to ensure that a persecuted people can both survive and prosper.

Australia has now reached the 'truth-telling' phase of real reconciliation. After two centuries of colonial dispossession, repression masked as harmony and silent shame, this is a novel that explores the notion of how one might - after so much pain, so many lies, in a time where the oppressed remain battered, broken, incarcerated and resented, how might we possibly find any kind of peace together?

I don't want to say too much, but I was surprised by how effective this angry, sad and (blackly) funny book is in exploring these issues. There is a nuance to the gendered and racialised violence not frequently seen. Scott pulls no punches, and yet true and genuine hope for something better remains.

In it, the centrality of maintaining and reconnecting with a past shines through. In a bleak and dire present, the redemptive power of understanding country, culture and language shines through. For too many, this starts inside the four walls of a prison does not diminish its importance. Indeed, understanding one's Aboriginal heritage as not shameful or dangerous; rather, it offers hope and a redemptive path to healing and self-actualisation.

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