“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

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...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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