“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.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Comments

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

This is the moon. Have I mentioned how much I adore the zoom on my camera? It's Theme Thursday you see, and after last week's limp effort, I have been thinking about how I might redeem myself. Then I clicked on the topic and discover that it was BUTTON. We've been hearing a lot about the moon in the past couple of weeks. Apparently some fellas went up there and played golf and what-not forty-odd years ago. The desire to get to the moon, however, was not simply about enhancing opportunities for Meg and Mog titles and skirting local planning by-laws in the construction of new and innovative golf courses. No, all of your Sputniks , "One small steps" and freeze dried ice cream was about one thing , and one thing only : MAD Now, I don't mean mad in terms of "bloke breaks record for number of scorpions he can get up his bum", no I mean MAD as in Mutual assured destruction . When I was a young man you see, there was a lot of talk about the type of m...

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

This will hurt me...

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